[NEW DATE] The book about homosexuality during the Iberian dictatorships, which is based on Raquel Afonso‘s doctoral thesis developed at the IHC, will be launched at the Tigre de Papel bookshop in Lisbon, with a presentation by Sérgio Vitorino.

Memórias Dissidentes

Repressão e resistências quotidianas de homossexuais e lésbicas nas ditaduras ibéricas

Neste livro, resgatam-se histórias silenciadas de homossexuais e lésbicas que viveram sob as ditaduras ibéricas do século XX. A partir de uma antropologia que cruza ciência e militância, e entre arquivos e memórias vivas, reflecte-se sobre opressão, resistência, classe e género. Escovar a história a contrapelo é um gesto de memória e de justiça, que recupera passados para pensar o presente e imaginar futuros possíveis.

O livro, uma edição da Tigre de Papel, será apresentado, nesta sessão, pela autora e por Sérgio Vitorino.

The book on women’s struggle against fascism and colonialism, edited by Regina Marques, Inocência Mata, Leonor Teixeira, Joana Dias Pereira and Raquel Ribeiro, will be presented at the Aljube Museum by Isabel Araújo Branco.

Mulheres na Luta contra o Fascismo e o Colonialismo

No dia 12 de Novembro, o Museu do Aljube vai acolher a apresentação do livro “Mulheres na luta contra o fascismo e o colonialismo“, por Isabel Araújo Branco, Regina Marques (dirigente do MDM), Olga Iglésias, Antonieta Rosa Gomes (investigadoras) e Isabel Van-Dunem (dirigente da OMA), com moderação Raquel Ribeiro (investigadora).

Este livro, editado pela Colibri, é o resultado do Congresso Internacional com o mesmo nome que teve lugar na Torre do Tombo em Novembro de 2024 e da responsabilidade de três instituições (MDM, CEComp — FLUL e IHC — NOVA FCSH) para o qual contou com um financiamento do Instituto Camões.

“Nos 50 anos do 25 de Abril e das independências das colónias portuguesas em África, as discussões agora publicadas neste livro demonstram a convergência entre a resistência antifascista em Portugal e os movimentos anticoloniais e pela independência em África. A literatura, as cartas clandestinas, a organização comunitária e militante, mas também dados concretos sobre a realidade da vida e do quotidiano das mulheres, emergem como ferramentas da sua resistência, revelando como as mulheres não só combateram a violência da colonização e do fascismo, mas estão também a construir novas identidades políticas e culturais. Um projecto promissor de articulações na senda de Abril.”

Mais informações sobre o livro

Irene Flunser Pimentel’s new book, about the relations between the Portuguese political police and the secret services of various countries, will be launched at FNAC Avenida de Roma, in Lisbon, with a presentation by José Pedro Castanheira.

Relações Perigosas

A cumplicidade da PIDE com as secretas ocidentais

As quase três décadas de relacionamento entre a polícia política da ditadura portuguesa, entre 1945 e 1975, com os seus vários nomes de PIDE e DGS, e as polícias e serviços secretos de países ocidentais durante a Guerra Fria permitem retirar uma conclusão central.

Ainda que vigorasse em Portugal uma ditadura colonial, tal não impediu que, no âmbito da NATO e da Interpol, as polícias e serviços secretos de informação de países ocidentais e democráticos colaborassem com a PIDE/DGS e trocassem informações entre si.

A PIDE – e depois a DGS – era, tal como o KGB soviético, uma polícia que zelava pela segurança interna e externa do Estado. Nesta última qualidade, relacionou-se com a CIA norte-americana, a Seguridad espanhola, o BND alemão, bem como com os serviços policiais e de informação europeus e dos países da NATO, nomeadamente de França, da Bélgica e dos Países Baixos.

Mais informações sobre o livro

Workshop that aims to place the OAU initiatives in their context and help consolidate analyses of its solidarity as a critical subject of the end of colonialism and white minority regimes.

The Organization of African Unity and the Struggle against Colonialism and Racism in Africa

The study of international organizations is an emerging field that covers a topic of growing importance in academia. In recent decades, the contributions of such organizations as actors in international relations have received increasing attention (Iriye 2004). Theoretical and empirical analyses seek to provide insights into the work of intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, or transnational networks. By expanding their geographical scope beyond national borders, scholars interested in international organizations have reflected the myriad ways in which they can be studied (Hurd 2012).

The Organization of African Unity (OAU), as a regional organization, has been the subject of ongoing research (Gassama 2015). However, a review of existing publications reveals that relatively few studies have addressed the OAU’s solidarity against colonialism and racism in Africa. Several reasons may explain this situation. Comparatively, the OAU has received less attention than other international organizations, notably the United Nations. Research has mainly focused on its establishment and achievements in conflict resolution, cooperation and development (Muchie et al. 2014; Naldi 1999). Difficulties in accessing primary sources may also have contributed to the diversion of interest from the OAU’s contribution to decolonization and the end of white minority regimes.

Writing on the subject has mostly been done at the time of the events and lacks historical perspective (Binaisa 1977; El-Khawas 1978). The accounts are limited in scope, discussing primarily the OAU’s support for the liberation movements of Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa (Klotz 1995; Thomas 1996). With regard to the Portuguese colonies, with the exception of the work of Walraven (1999), it is difficult to find an overarching narrative, and the available information is mostly found in publications that do not focus on the topic as a primary concern (Sousa 2011; Tíscar Santiago 2013).

Thus, a more critical approach is needed to question what the OAU did to support the struggle against colonialism and racism in Africa, as well as the complexities and nuances involved. With this situation in mind, we intend to explore the OAU’s solidarity with the struggle against colonialism and racism in Africa in a workshop in-person and online that will take place in Lisbon, at the Institute of Contemporary History of the NOVA University of Lisbon, on 13 and 14 November 2025.

The workshop aims to place the OAU initiatives in their context and help consolidate analyses of its solidarity as a critical subject of the end of colonialism and white minority regimes. In addition, the workshop will contribute to rethinking the gaps in historiography by examining the OAU solidarity as a transnational phenomenon that transcended national boundaries.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations on these and other topics:

• The extent to which the OAU played a role in ending colonialism and racism on the African continent;
• How the Liberation Committee was instrumental in the strategy of the OAU to undermine colonial rule and racist minority rule;
• How the attitudes of a number of states, due to inter-African competition, shaped the OAU’s policies on colonialism and racism;
• How the diplomacy of the OAU sought to shape the debate at the UN on colonialism and racism;
• How the OAU engaged with non-African countries as part of its support to the struggle for independence and against apartheid;
• How the organization worked as an intermediary in the support given by third parties to anti-colonial and anti-racist organizations;
• The importance of the relationship with the OAU for anti-colonial and anti-racist organizations to advance their agenda;
• The tensions and disagreements between the OAU and the anti-colonial and anti-racist organizations;
• The extent to which the anti-colonial and anti-racist organizations sought to use the OAU not only against the colonial and racist powers, but also to sideline competing groups.

Abstracts for presentations (200 words) and a biographical note (250 words) should be sent to: OAUconference@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions: 8 August 2025
Notification of acceptance: 15 August 2025

The organizers foresee the publication of the communications. The first draft of the papers is due on 30 January 2026.

>> Download the call for papers (PDF) >>

Organization:

Aurora Almada e Santos (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)

References:

BINAISA, Godfrey – «Organization of African Unity and Decolonization: Present and Future Trends» in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Vol. 432 (1977).
EI-KHAWAS, Mohamed A. – «The Quiet Role of OAU in Africa’s Liberation» in New Directions Vol. 5, Issue 2 (1978).
GASSAMA, Muhammad – From the OAU to the AU: The Odyssey of a Continental Organization. Paris: l’Harmattan, 2015.
HURD, Ian – Choices and Methods in the Study of International Organizations. Available at <URL:http://www.unstudies.org/sites/unstudies.org/files/hurd_jios.pdf>, on 18/03/2012.
IRIYE, Akira – Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
KLOTZ, Audie – Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1995.
MUCHIE, Mammo et al. (ed.) – Unite or Perish: Africa Fifty Years after the Founding of the OAU. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2014.
NALDI, Gino Joseph – The Organization of African Unity: An Analysis of its Role. London: Mansell, 1999.
SOUSA, Julião Soares – Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973). Vida e Morte de um Revolucionário Africano. Lisboa: Nova Vega, Lda, 2011.
THOMAS, Scott M. – The Diplomacy of Liberation: The Foreign Relations of the ANC Since 1960. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996.
TÍSCAR SANTIAGO, María José – Diplomacia Peninsular e Operações Secretas na Guerra Colonial. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2013.
WALRAVEN, Klaas van – Dreams of Power: The Role of the Organization of African Unity in the Politics of Africa. 1963-1993. Leiden: African Studies Centre, 1999.

Round table discussion aimed at debating and deconstructing some of the myths surrounding 25 November 1975, questioning its place in the history of the Portuguese revolution.

O 25 de Novembro entre história, memória e mito

O 25 de Novembro de 1975 foi sempre uma data controversa. A multiplicidade de forças em acção e a complexidade do processo revolucionário tornam a sua análise particularmente resistente a interpretações lineares. Desde 1975, o significado do 25 de Novembro dependeu das diferentes posições dos protagonistas, das opções metodológicas das várias correntes historiográficas debruçadas sobre o período, e da própria memória social do PREC.

O cinquentenário, que se assinala este ano, é mais um exemplo das tentativas de rejeição e apropriação daquele momento, mas constitui também uma oportunidade para repensar o seu significado numa história mais vasta da revolução. Esta mesa-redonda reúne um conjunto de historiadores/as que se têm dedicado ao estudo do processo revolucionário de 1974-75, com o propósito de debater e desconstruir alguns dos mitos que rodeiam o 25 de Novembro, interrogando o seu lugar na história da revolução, bem como os sucessivos usos políticos feitos a partir da sua memória.

ENTRADA LIVRE

Participantes:

Ricardo Noronha (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
António Louçã
David Castaño (IPRI — NOVA FCSH)
Irene Flunser Pimentel (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Fernando Dores Costa (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)

Workshop that intends to investigate the relation between “global infrastructures” and “practices of rent-extraction”, both historically and in the global present. Deadline: 15 September 2025

Infrastructures of Rent Extraction

According to a number of prominent analyses, the contemporary world-market is characterised by “a full-fledged comeback and proliferation of forms of rent” (Vercellone 2010; see also: Harvey 2015, Mezzadra & Neilson 2017, Purcell 2018, Christophers 2020, Standing 2020). This political and economic shift demands granular reflections, and it has stimulated widespread theoretical and political debates.

Building upon classical Marxist critiques of imperialism – which emphasized the role of the imperialist “rentier state” as “a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism” (Lenin 1917) – a number of critics have suggested that the growing centrality of rent-extraction in global cycles of capital accumulation indicates a significant shift in the history of the capitalist mode of production from ‘neoliberalism’ to ‘rentier capitalism’ (Christophers 2020, Sadowski 2020, Birch & Ward 2023; Borg & Policante 2024). The neoliberal market presents itself as an arena of free trade, competition, entrepreneurship, and frictionless mobility. Yet, as these authors emphasize, control over key assets – such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, logistical and digital infrastructure – is increasingly dominated by a restricted number of companies and individuals: rentiers, passively piling up the returns accruing from their ownership of essential conditions of (re)production: land, water, housing, utilities, infrastructures and platforms.

Others (more problematically, from our perspective) have gone as far as suggesting that the growth of rent relations can be interpreted as a shift from capitalism to techno-feudalism (Varoufakis 2023, Durand 2024, Mazzuccato 2019, Dean 2025). This narrative stresses that contemporary digital economies are no longer driven primarily by labor exploitation, but by monopolistic control over digital infrastructures and rent extraction. According to this approach, today’s tech giants resemble lords presiding over private infrastructural fiefdoms, continuously extracting value from us captured users. This dynamic is intricately linked to ‘platformisation’, whereby Big Tech firms charge ‘rent’ for providing access to monopolised digital platforms (Sadowski, 2020; Mezzadra et al. 2024).

By controlling different layers of the digital stack, Big Tech companies appear to be increasingly able to extract value from global production chains. GAFAM – and more precisely the Big Three of the Cloud (AWS, Google Cloud Provider and Microsoft Azure) – currently control two thirds of global Cloud capacity. Citizens, private firms, states, and international organizations increasingly rely on their services, renting stock capacity, algorithmic elaboration, and AI functions. Such a position of power is reinforced by their growing control over many of the infrastructures that support the digital – datacenters, submarine fiber cables, power plants etc. How do we make sense of the power of Big Tech, and the growing importance of what we may call imperative “infrastructure rents”, i.e. rent relations that have become increasingly compulsory, inescapable and designed within the very infrastructural fabric of the world market?

Moving away from “presentism” may help us to properly contextualize and historicize this contemporary conjuncture. Current analyses of Big Tech ‘rentierism’, for instance, has pushed many to turn back to classic studies on “rentier states” and “imperialist rent”. Samir Amin, for instance, focusing on the impact of colonial control over extractive and logistical infrastructures, stressed that “to the extent that monopolies operate in the peripheries of the globalized system, monopoly rent becomes an imperialist rent” (Amin 2019). Similarly, Hazem Beblawi’s classic “The Rentier State in the Arab World” (1987: 383) stressed the emergence of “extraverted states”, whose main lever of power is the control over infrastructures enabling the extraction of rents. In particular, according to Beblawi, “transit countries” such as Egypt have long relied on their control over key global infrastructures – such as ports, railways, oil pipelines, and the Suez Canal – to extract and distribute “external location rent”.

This analysis may provide a point of entry to reflect upon the growing competition to control key “global infrastructures” such as pipelines and ports, power cables and fiber optic networks, transcontinental railways and highways. For instance, Loftus, March and Purcell (2019, 2020) have shown how processes of financialization have enabled “apparently fixed and stable forms such as pipes, water treatment plants, and sewers to be transformed into liquid assets”, opening up new opportunities for rent-extraction. More generally, Ranabir Samaddar (2018: 110) suggests that “the logistical expansion of the city […] resurrects the rent factor from oblivion in a capitalist economy”; and urgently asks: “What does the revival of the rent question mean for postcolonial accumulation?” These analyses emphasize that global infrastructures play a fundamental role in planetary processes of value-capture and rent-extraction.

Expanding on these debates, the conference intends to investigate the relation between “global infrastructures” and “practices of rent-extraction”, both historically and in the global present. We welcome contributions that investigate the relation between historical processes of infrastructuralisation, financialisation, and rentierisation of the economy. We are particularly interested in furthering a collective reflection on the ways in which rent relations extend well beyond land markets and shape the global circulation and capture of value across logistical, extractive and digital infrastructures.

Some possible questions that demand further reflection and analysis may be:

• What is the role played by global infrastructures in enabling practices of rent extraction by transnational corporations as well as national states?
• How is rent extracted in different geographical and historical contexts?
• What forms of labour(s) and knowledge(s) are mobilised in order to extract rents?
• How has the control over key infrastructures enabled the capture of value in colonial and post-colonial context?
• To what extent concepts such as ‘rentier capitalism’ and ‘techno-feudalism’ may further – or hinder – critical understandings of contemporary capitalism?
• How can we understand the relationship between ‘rentier states’, ‘rentier capitalism’ and ‘rentier imperialism’, both historically and in the present moment?
• Who has monopolistic control over key global infrastructures, and what sort of power results from such control?
• What forms of resistance to ‘rent extraction’ have been growing in recent years, from ‘rent strikes’ to cyberpiracy?

We welcome papers dealing with all these aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective. Interested scholars are invited to send an abstract and a short bio to Amedeo Policante [policante@fcsh.unl.pt] and Mattia Frapporti [mattia.frapporti2@unibo.it] by 15 September 2025. The final workshop will take place on 28 November 2025, at the University of Bologna.

>> Download the call for papers (PDF)

References:

– Amin, S. (2012). The surplus in monopoly capitalism and the imperialist rent. Monthly Review, 64(3), 78.
– Beblawi, H. (1987). The Rentier State in the Arab World. Arab Studies Quarterly, 9(4), 383–398.
– Birch, K., & Ward, C. (2023). Introduction: Critical approaches to rentiership. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(6), 1429-1437.
– Borg, E., & Policante, A. (2024). The Gene Editing Business: Rent Extraction in the Biotech Industry. Review of Political Economy, 1-36.
– Dean, J. (2025). Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso Books.
– Durand, C. (2024). How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy. Verso Books.
– Harvey, D. (2012). Ponzi Scheme Capitalism: An Interview with David Harvey by Steffen Böhm. Review31. [http://review31.co.uk/interview/view/16/]
– Lenin, V. (1917) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, In: Essential Works of Lenin, New York, 1966, pp. 245-246.
– Christophers, B. (2020). Rentier capitalism: Who owns the economy, and who pays for it?. Verso Books.
– Mazzucato M (2019) Preventing digital feudalism. Project Syndicate. Available at: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/platform-economy-digital-feudalism-by-mariana-mazzucato-2019-10 (accessed 23 October 2024).
– Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2017). On the multiple frontiers of extraction: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Cultural studies, 31(2-3), 185-204.
– Mezzadra, S., Cuppini, N., Frapporti, M., Pirone, M., (2024). Capitalism in the Platform Age. Emerging Assemblages of Labour and Welfare in Urban Spaces. Berlin, Springer.
– Purcell, T. F., Loftus, A., & March, H. (2020). Value–rent–finance. Progress in human geography, 44(3), 437-456.
– Sadowski, J. (2020). The internet of landlords: Digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism. Antipode, 52(2), 562-580.
– Samaddar, R. (2018). The logistical city. In India’s contemporary urban conundrum. Routledge, pp.104-115.
– Standing, G. (2021). The corruption of capitalism: Why rentiers thrive and work does not pay. Biteback Publishing.
– Varoufakis, Y. (2023) Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House.
– Vercellone, C. (2010) The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit. In Fumagalli, A. & Mezzadra, S. (eds.) Crisis in the global economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, Semiotext(e), pp. 85-118.