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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL 341

Cohen and Arato (1992), Hall (1995), and categories, such as: sustainability, cultural
Lyman (1995) discussed civil society and diversity, democratic governance, local
democratization. They articulated the topic of power, radical and deliberative democracy
social movements in terms of public space and and accountability (see Souza Santos, 2002).
democratic regimes using Habermas’ perspec- These categories affirm that cultural differ-
tive. All these authors have influenced Brazilian ences should be respected – the values, habits
analyses of social movements. and behaviour of both groups and individu-
In the 1990s, there was also a revival of als, belonging to a society, globalized by the
some classical exponents of sociological economy and by the multiple interactions of
analyses, coming from critical social theory, the media (TV, Internet, etc.). In Brazil, stud-
political science, psychology or philosophy. ies of social movements have recently been
Such authors as Bobbio, Arendt, Tocqueville, published in books by Avritzer et al. (2004),
Elias, Bourdieu, Giddens and Foucault Costa (2002, 2006), Dagnino (2002) and
contributed to the development of theoretical Dagnino et al.(2006), Doimo (1995), Gohn,
fields, as did such critical theorists as (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b,
Habermas, Alexander and Honneth. The 2007), Scherer-Warren (1993), and Teixeira
influence of historians such as Hobsbawm (2001), among others.
became more marked and widespread in sev-
eral fields, not only in social movements
studies. In the 2000s, within sociological
analysis, there was also a revival of some WHICH SOCIAL MOVEMENTS HAVE
classical exponents of symbolic interaction- BEEN RESEARCHED: A PANORAMA
ism including studies by Goffman, and Wirth
on sociability in the city. In Brazil, most of the studies and publica-
New analytical categories developed for tions about social movements have been
use in the analysis of the movements, among coordinated by women. Interstingly, the pres-
them: the public sphere, civil society, social ence of Afro-Brazilians has only been exam-
exclusion and inclusion, political culture, ined by researchers of the Afro-Brazilian
planetary citizenship, active citizenship, civic movement.
citizenship, citizen participation, political A brief overview of the social movements
opportunities, belonging, empowerment, of the last decades of the twentieth century
social networks, social ties and so on. The and the beginning of this millennium in
category ‘globalization’ has been used so Brazil discloses part of the construction of
widely that it no longer explains social differ- the political democratic process of recent
ences and this has produced a homogeniza- decades; it also shows the extent of poverty
tion of the interpretation of social reality. and exclusion within society. This panorama
However, there was a reorientation of the can be described using the following the-
analyses. They were no longer exclusively matic focal points of struggles and
focused on the social movements and NGOs; demands:
rather the focus shifted to the interaction of
civil society with political society, to the 1 Movements about living conditions in cities, cen-
public, not the state sphere, to the policies of tred around housing issues, with these struggles
expressed on two fronts: (a) the articulation of
partnerships of the movements and organiza-
socio-political networks comprised of intellectu-
tions with the government and public admin-
als of the centre-left and popular movements
istration (although participation is almost
about urban issues (the habitat, the city, strictly
exclusively by NGOs and rarely by the
speaking). They have participated in the process
movements). They were, then, relocated to of developing and obtaining the ‘Estatuto da
institutional analysis. This has given rise to Cidade’ (City Statute), a federal law of 2001 on
the elaboration of additional analytical issues of urban policies. The National Congress