ABSTRACT
In an authoritarian context that relies on political demobilization and atomization, social movements can provide the space in which individuals claim or reclaim collective practices and rights discourses that literally perform emerging democratic versions of citizenship. In the Spanish case, the chapter discusses the participation in civic associations and other social movements and during the political transition helped Spaniards construct a new practice of democratic citizenship. Whereas citizenship is usually associated with the nation, as the entity that guarantees its formal membership, scholars have argued that it is operative at both the supra-national and the sub-national level, that is, both global and local citizenship. Whereas most of the literature on local citizenship focuses on democratic states, the concept can also be utilized to frame rights claims under an authoritarian regime like Spain in the mid-1970s. For social movement theorists, the opportunity structure of favorable economic and political contexts provides no more than the basic pre-condition for mobilization.
