‘I wanted to carry out the revolution’: activists’ trajectories in Portugal from dictatorship to democracy

Abstract

This article reconstructs the life trajectories of Portuguese radical left activists who mobilized against the Estado Novo authoritarian regime between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. It analyses the consequences of political engagement on the political and life trajectories of the activists across three different institutional settings: an authoritarian regime (until 1974), a revolutionary process (1974–1975) and a democracy (from 1976 onwards). The aim is to understand how the engagement and its consequences changed according to the changes at a political level. The underlying question is ‘what became of the radical activists who mobilized against the Portuguese dictatorship in the late 1960s’? To address this question, I adopt a longitudinal perspective, which contextualizes the present life of the former activists in a longer process, composed of different phases of engagement, activism, prison, disengagement, reconversion and life as former activists. I understand these phases as strictly interconnected to the organizational dynamics (groups and networks) and the political processes.