The Catholic Church and the Portuguese Dictatorial Regime: the case of Paul VI’s visit to Fátima

The visit of Pope Paul VI at Fatima on May 13, 1967, provides us with a perspective that reveals the nature of relations between the Catholic Church and the New State at the entrance of the last years of the regime. The context of the visit (followed by the visit of Paul VI to Bombay in December 1964 and the offer of the Golden Rose to the shrine of Fatima in May 1965) highlights the position adopted by the ecclesiastical hierarchy collaboration with political options of the regime. While the papal visit progressed, the Salazar regime was able to impose a political ownership of the event. The visit of Paul VI was effectively used to reaffirm the ideological foundations of the regime, "legitimize" the colonial war, and confine the political opposition to the dictatorship. The effects caused by the papal visit on the environment of domestic politics reveals the crucial role that the Portuguese Catholic Church had, still in 1967 in legitimize the New State, and consequently their major contribution to the longevity of the dictatorship.A visita do Papa Paulo VI a Fátima, em 13 de Maio de 1967, fornece-nos uma perspectiva reveladora da natureza das relações entre a Igreja Católica e o Estado Novo à entrada dos últimos anos do regime. O contexto da visita (antecedida pela visita de Paulo VI a Bombaim em Dezembro de 1964 e pela oferta da Rosa de Ouro ao Santuário de Fátima em Maio de 1965) evidencia a posição de colaboração adoptada pela hierarquia eclesiástica para com as opções políticas do regime. Enquanto a visita papal decorria, o regime salazarista logrou impor uma apropriação política do acontecimento. A visita de Paulo VI foi eficazmente usada para reafirmar as bases ideológicas do regime, “legitimar” a guerra colonial, e acantonar a oposição política à ditadura. Os efeitos causados pela visita papal sobre o ambiente da política interna revelam o papel fundamental que a Igreja Católica Portuguesa tinha, ainda em 1967, na legitimação do Estado Novo, e consequentemente, o seu importante contributo para a longevidade do regime ditatorial

10 Year Anniversary and Sapphire Award Symposium Advertising Placements, January-April 2011

10 Year Anniversary and Sapphire Award Symposium Advertising Placements, January-April 2011

Success versus failure in local public goods provision: council and chiefly governance in post-war Makeni, Sierra Leone

Post-war Sierra Leone faces a deep deficit in the supply of basic public goods which is detrimental to quality of life and remains a risk factor for future conflict. The government, under substantial donor influence, seeks to address this deficit through democratic decentralization. However, evidence of the link between decentralization and improved public goods provision remains weak. I approach the public goods deficit from a different angle; rather than assuming that an imported solution is needed, I consider what can be learned from existing patterns of public goods provision. At the core of this study is a comparison of ‘success versus failure’ in local public goods provision in the city of Makeni, with the aim of understanding key dynamics that lead to divergent outcomes. While I set out to focus on cases of public goods provision led by two main categories of local government actors — elected councils and chiefs — I found that it in all four cases, citizens played a substantial role. I therefore analyze the cases as instances of coproduction of public goods. I find that coproduction is an important means of maintaining a basic supply of local public goods when state capacity is weak. With this in mind, I draw on the case study evidence to develop a set of propositions about the conditions under which coproduction is more likely to succeed in contemporary Sierra Leone. These propositions are suggestive of an alternate institutional approach to addressing the public goods deficit—one that is based on the development of workarounds for key obstacles rather than institutional overhaul. However, coproduction is no ‘magic bullet’; it has troubling implications for social equality and the development of state capacity over the longer term and thus judgements about the desirability of coproductive arrangements are likely to involve complex trade-offs

Reorganization in Dynamic Agent Societies

En la nueva era de tecnologías de la información, los sistemas tienden a ser cada vez más dinámicos, compuestos por entidades heterogéneas capaces de entrar y salir del sistema, interaccionar entre ellas, y adaptarse a las necesidades del entorno. Los sistemas multiagente han contribuído en los ultimos años, a modelar, diseñar e implementar sistemas autónomos con capacidad de interacción y comunicación. Estos sistemas se han modelado principalmente, a través de sociedades de agentes, las cuales facilitan la interación, organización y cooperación de agentes heterogéneos para conseguir diferentes objetivos. Para que estos paradigmas puedan ser utilizados para el desarrollo de nuevas generaciones de sistemas, características como dinamicidad y capacidad de reorganización deben estar incorporadas en el modelado, gestión y ejecución de estas sociedades de agentes. Concretamente, la reorganización en sociedades de agentes ofrece un paradigma para diseñar aplicaciones abiertas, dinámicas y adaptativas. Este proceso requiere determinar las consecuencias de cambiar el sistema, no sólo en términos de los beneficios conseguidos sinó además, midiendo los costes de adaptación así como el impacto que estos cambios tienen en todos los componentes del sistema. Las propuestas actuales de reorganización, básicamente abordan este proceso como respuestas de la sociedad cuando ocurre un cambio, o bien como un mecanismo para mejorar la utilidad del sistema. Sin embargo, no se pueden definir procesos complejos de decisión que obtengan la mejor configuración de los componentes organizacionales en cada momento, basándose en una evaluación de los beneficios que se podrían obtener así como de los costes asociados al proceso. Teniendo en cuenta este objetivo, esta tesis explora el área de reorganización en sociedades de agentes y se centra principalmente, en una propuesta novedosa para reorganización. Nuestra propuesta ofrece un soporte de toma de decisiones que considera cambios en múltiplesAlberola Oltra, JM. (2013). Reorganization in Dynamic Agent Societies [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/19243Palanci

Being a young activist in the late Mubarak era : An ethnography of political engagement in Egypt

This is an ethnographic study of the lived experiences of young activists during the last years of Mubarak s presidency in Egypt. Its general aim is to provide an understanding of what it was like to be involved in opposition politics during a period when the eventual end of Mubarak s rule in 2011 was little more than a collective aspiration. Drawing on different strands of qualitative social science, including anthropology, sociology and youth research, the study is based on 12 months of fieldwork in Cairo, conducted between 2007 and 2011. It makes use of political engagement as an open analytic that enables the examination of different activities that were oriented towards, but not exclusive to, public political processes and formal avenues to political participation. In this vein, the study explores the activities that the young activists regarded as meaningful in terms of challenging the status quo, and how being young in itself shaped their ways of participating in public political life. While it focuses on the experiences of young Cairenes who were predominantly male and aged in their 20s, it is acknowledged that important differences existed among them that conditioned their efforts to acquire new visibilities and political roles, including social differences such as class, gender and global connectedness. In order to explore the diversity of their political experiences, the study discusses four principal areas of analysis and related topics: namely, generational consciousness, tactical practice, friendship relations and ethical reflections. It is demonstrated that, firstly, the new forms of youth activism in the 2000s promoted a critical generational consciousness as a disenfranchised social location in the intergenerational order, while also providing reinvigorated meanings to youth as a subversive political category, and in some ways a privileged experiential realm, ready to conduct public political dissent on its own terms. The new youth movements, such as Youth for Change and April 6 Youth that emerged on the fringes of larger processes of contentious politics, assumed new roles in public political life and merged, at least temporarily, young Egyptians from different backgrounds and affiliations into collective actions: forging alliances, largely beyond the formal political institutions. Secondly, the young activists resorted to a number of tactical practices in order to reach out to wider publics via both offline and online avenues. Their operating preferences lay in organizing unlicensed street protests in the popular, lower-class residential areas and tapping into the subversive potential of the new information and communication technologies, including blogs and social media. Although these forms of public dissent expanded their otherwise narrow political opportunities, their adoption was not, however, equally available to everyone. Some either had the necessary social networks in place, including family support, or the available time and the economic means to do so, while those, who were less equipped for public dissent, could nonetheless acquire new combinations of practical skills, knowledge and social connections that enabled them to enact their sense of meaningful political action. At the same time, the efforts to build youth coalitions faced a number of challenges, one of which was internal factionalism, which, coupled with the growing use of social media, diversified the scope of youth activism in the run-up period to the 2011 uprisings. Thirdly, being a young activist in the late 2000s provided much more varied everyday experiences than merely the acts of public political dissent. It also involved absorbing pre-existing oppositional culture and adopting dissident lifestyles that were filled with shared moments of being and doing things with others on a daily basis. In the absence of representative political institutions, the experiences of having friends and being a friend to others offered intimate avenues to public political life that stretched beyond kin ties and formal organizations. Although oppositional youth activism was divided along lines of class, gender and political affiliation, the young could forge mutual grounds for friendship relations on the basis of their shared experiences and stories of contention, while frequenting downtown Cairo as the main hub of their everyday trajectories. Although friendship relations were at times volatile in the contested field of politics, safeguarding the bonds of trust, belonging and everyday solidarity represented highly relevant everyday activities. Fourthly, the young Cairenes were faced with a number of ethical reflections on the meaningfulness of their own dissent practices, not the least due to the personals risks that opposition politics involved in authoritarian settings. While the prospect of impoverishment did not generally motivate their political engagements, they shared a sense of injured patriotism that prevailed in the wider prodemocracy movement, and aspired to greater recognition as rightful citizens. At the same time, they operated on an ambivalent moral terrain that required positioning one s self and others in relation to normative claims to the common good; furthermore, they had to contend with popular suspicion about the impact of their public political dissent and about possible motives for their activism, such as the pursuit of social status and personal wellbeing. Despite the differences that existed among the activist youth in terms of class and gender, however, they could in part challenge these types of speculations by enacting the prevailing ideals of personhood in terms of bravery, righteousness and self-sacrifice. Meanwhile, although the young Cairenes were embedded in the moral worlds of prodemocracy mobilization, they were also compelled to balance their political engagements in terms of multiple life transitions, especially in terms of balancing their activism with the requirements of gaining a livelihood. While there were multiple ways of being or becoming an activist in the late Mubarak era, the young Cairenes political engagements were connected to their collective pursuit of playing a meaningful role in what happened in the present, while acknowledging that Egypt s future was intimately tied to their own life trajectories.Väitöstutkimus tarkastelee aktivistinuorten kokemuksia presidentti Hosni Mubarakin toimikauden loppupuolella Egyptissä. Se tutkii nuorten poliittista osallistumista sanan laajassa merkityksessä ja tarkastelee poliittisen vastarinnan muotoja ja arkipäivän tekoja, joita aktivistit pitivät tärkeinä vallitsevien olojen muuttamiseksi. Samalla on tutkittu, kuinka nuoruus määritti heidän kokemuksiaan politiikasta aikana, jolloin Mubarakin hallinnon päättyminen vuoden 2011 kansannousun myötä ei ollut vielä heidän näköpiirissään. Tutkimus perustuu yhteensä 12 kuukauden mittaiseen etnografiseen kenttätyöhön vuosien 2007 ja 2011 välillä. Se keskittyy kairolaisnuoriin, joista valtaosa oli 20-30-vuotiaita miehiä. Samalla huomioidaan, että 2000-luvun nuorisoaktivismi oli hyvin monialainen ilmiö ja että nuorten väliset sosiaaliset erot kuten luokka, sukupuoli ja kosmopoliittisuus määrittivät heidän pyrkimyksiään omaksua uusia rooleja Mubarakin hallinnon vastaisessa liikehdinnässä. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan nuorten kokemusten monimuotoisuutta neljästä näkökulmasta: ensin käsitellään sukupolvitietoisuuden rakentumista ja rakentamista, ja seuraavaksi nuorten vastarinnan taktisia käytäntöjä sekä ystävyyssuhteiden ja eettisten pohdintojen merkitystä heidän arkielämässään. Tutkimus osoittaa, että 2000-luvun nuorisoaktivismi ja uudet nuorisoliikkeet kokosivat yhteen eri taustaisia nuoria, jotka toimivat virallisen puoluepolitiikan ulkopuolella ja edesauttoivat sukupolvitietoisuuden rakentumista ja nuoruuden uudelleenmäärittelyä oppositioliikkeiden piirissä. Tässä yhteydessä tarkastellaan erityisesti Nuoret Muutoksen Puolesta- ja Huhtikuun 6. Päivän Nuoret-liikkeitä, jotka kehittyivät laajemman demokratialiikkeen ja työläisten lakkoliikkeiden yhteydessä. Kairolaisnuoret turvautuivat kekseliäisiin poliittisen vaikuttamisen käytäntöihin, ja suosivat katuprotestien järjestämistä pääkaupungin köyhemmillä asuinalueilla ja tieto- ja viestintäteknologioiden valjastamista poliittisen toimintansa välineiksi. Aktivismin uudet muodot täydensivät nuorten poliittisen osallistumisen rajallisia mahdollisuuksia, mutta ne eivät olleet yhtälailla kaikkien ulottuvilla. Osa nuorista omaksui niitä taloudellisen asemansa, perheensä tuen sekä sosiaalisten verkostojensa turvin. Toiset toteuttivat merkityksellisinä pitämiään poliittisia tekoja omaksumalla käytännön tietoja ja taitoja sekä solmimalla suhteita poliittisen opposition piirissä. Nuorisoliikkeiden sisäinen jakautuminen sekä sosiaalisen median käytön kasvu myös monipuolistivat nuorisoaktivismin alaa vuoden 2011 kansannousua edeltävinä vuosina. Samalla julkisen vastarinnan eri muodot, kuten mielenosoitukset, edustivat suhteellisen yksittäisiä tapahtumia aktivistinuorten arkielämässä. He viettivät suuren osan ajastaan Kairon keskustassa ja solmivat ystävyyssuhteita, jotka perustuivat yhteisiin vastarintakokemuksiin ja -kertomuksiin sekä heidän vaihtoehtoiseen elämäntapaansa. Ystävyyssuhteet olivat nuorille hyvin merkittäviä epävirallisia verkostoja sukulaisuussuhteiden ja muodollisten organisaatioiden ohessa. Ne olivat kuitenkin epävakaita jakautuneessa poliittisessa ympäristössä, jossa keskinäistä luottamusta, yhteenkuuluvuutta ja arjen solidaarisuutta ylläpitävien suhteiden ylläpidon merkitys korostui entisestään. Kairolaisnuoret myös kohtasivat lukuisia eettisiä kysymyksiä osallistuessaan riskialttiiseen oppositiotoimintaan. Toisaalta heitä yhdisti demokratialiikkeen piirissä jaettu patriotismi, joka perustui näkemykseen, että Mubarakin hallinto ajoi yhteisen hyvän nimissä omia etujaan, eikä turvannut heille kuuluvia oikeuksia. Toisaalta he kohtasivat julkisessa elämässä samankaltaisia epäluuloja heidän henkilökohtaisista motiiveistaan, mutta pystyivät torjumaan niitä toimimalla rohkeuden, oikeudenmukaisuuden ja uhrautumisen ihanteiden mukaisesti. Mubarakin hallinnon vastainen toiminta sijoittui heidän elämänsä eri osa-alueille kuitenkin ristiriitaisilla tavoilla, etenkin suhteessa työelämään siirtymiseen tulevaisuudessa. Nuorten poliittista sitoutumista ja osallisuutta määritti yhteinen pyrkimys vaikuttaa yhteiskuntaan nykyhetkessä, ja ymmärrys siitä, että heidän elämänpolkunsa ja maan tulevaisuus olivat kiinteästi toisiinsa sidoksissa