Prefigurative politics and emergent communitarian spaces: The case of Portugal

Abstract

Prefiguration has become in the last years an important and powerful conceptualisation to understand the place–based constructions developed by different actors while attempting to create in their own interactions and in the way they organise their lives the kind of society they envision more respectful of inclusion, diversity and non-oppression. Concretely, this paper is focused on how the establishment of communitarian relations is of paramount importance to prefigurative politics. To this end, we will explore the concrete case of Portugal wherein an ever-growing number of communitarian projects (namely social centres, ecovillages and economic solidary networks) have been developed both in urban and country sides of the country in the last years. Implications for contemporary ideas on everyday struggle are discussed in the end.