Austerity, Protests and Abyssal Exclusions in Portugal
Channel: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra
Date: 2022-06-29

More than a decade after the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Portuguese government and the Troika, I discuss neoliberalism and democracy through the identification of discursive silences. Using the conceptual framework of the Epistemologies of the South to analyse the European context, it will be argued that it is necessary to recognize different kinds of inequalities and the abyssal lines that separate the strange civil society from the uncivil civil society. The ideas in discussion result from a sociology of absences produced in two phases: 1) what are the silences of official austerity narratives from the perspective of the anti-austerity protests that took place between 2011 and 2013? 2) What are the silences of those protests from the perspective of Roma activists' discourses?