Books by Pedro Ramos Pinto
This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the g... more This new edited collection brings together historians and social scientists to engage with the global history of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and offer historically-rich perspectives on contemporary debates about the future of work. In particular, the book goes beyond a genealogy of a seemingly utopian idea to explore how the meaning and reception of basic income proposals has changed over time. The study of UBI provides a prism through which we can understand how different intellectual traditions, political agents, and policy problems have opened up space for new thinking about work and welfare at critical moments.
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Driven by the increasing importance of discussions around 'impact' and its meaning and implicatio... more Driven by the increasing importance of discussions around 'impact' and its meaning and implications for history, The Impact of History? brings together established and new voices to raise relevant questions, issues and controversies for debate. The chapters are articulated around the themes of public history, the politics of history, the role of history in the shaping of learning and the situation of history in the changing world of education. While this subject is driven differently by the research bodies and councils of different countries, similar debates about the value and place of the academy in society are taking place in the UK, the USA and Europe as well as in other parts of the world.
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Papers by Pedro Ramos Pinto
Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, 2023
This article surveys and compares recent research on protest and transitions in Spain, Portugal a... more This article surveys and compares recent research on protest and transitions in Spain, Portugal and Greece. It charts how this body of work has paid increasing attention to questions of gender, culture, race and sexuality; to the interaction between multiple actors, and to the role of transnational processes. It also shows how each national historiography has developed different concerns and approaches: culture, identities and the post-transition era are more central to Greek debates. In Iberia, the late authoritarian period receives more attention; Spain reveals a greater wealth of local case studies; and revolutionary politics are central to the Portuguese case. This survey aims to encourage cross-polination between research on and across all three cases.
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British Journal of Sociology, 2021
In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty returns to questions of historical inequality, not merely... more In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty returns to questions of historical inequality, not merely to fill in the gaps in the earlier, widely circulated and impactful Capital in the 21st Century, but to undertake a far more ambitious and nuanced project. Critics (Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018; Moeller, 2016) pointed out that in the previous book, Piketty's consideration of the role of high concentrations wealth on inequality focused largely on a handful of relatively wealthy countries (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan). More importantly, it did not consider the political and economic relationships, forged by European colonization and the trans‐Atlantic slave trade that helped to create lasting inequalities in wealth, status, education, and life expectancy around the globe. These oversights corresponded to significant methodological gaps, in which inequalities defined by social status and identity, including gender, race, and caste, were largely left out of considerations that centered around economic and material disparities. Yet, these different forms of inequalities are intimately connected, as gender wage gaps and racial wealth gaps in different parts of the world attest.
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History of Political Economy, 2020
Introduction to HoPE Special Issue: The Measure of Inequality: Social Knowledge in Historical Per... more Introduction to HoPE Special Issue: The Measure of Inequality: Social Knowledge in Historical Perspective.
In the wake of current political volatilities and economic uncertainties, the consequences of rising inequality have moved to the forefront of global concerns. Understanding inequality – its forms, impact and solutions – is a crucial component of contemporary public policy but any attempt to grapple with inequality must contend with its history, but also with thorny issues of measurement and the accuracy of social metrics. Recent important interventions have highlighted the historical dimensions of inequality. We have also seen considerable debate on how to define and measure inequality. However, debates on the relevance and history of inequality have seldom engaged with the rich tradition of the history of knowledge, of technologies of measurement, and their social and political imbrications. Doing so strikes us as of critical importance: from Charles Booth’s mapping of poverty in early 1900s London to contemporary debates about the relative merits of the GINI index, from the Human Development Index to the use of happiness as a metric of welfare, the measurement, quantification and exposition of social disparity has moulded public debate and policy commitments. Knowledge, condensed through particular and historical forms of measurement, has also been key in shaping changing social commitments and attitudes towards the injustices of inequality.
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Histories of Global Inequality New Perspectives, 2019
The occupation of Zuccotti Park in Wall Street, New York in 2011 brought economic inequality to t... more The occupation of Zuccotti Park in Wall Street, New York in 2011 brought economic inequality to the forefront of political debates, framing it as the ‘the 99 vs the 1%’. Soon after, Thomas Piketty’s Capital became an unexpected editorial success. Bringing together work on the history of economic measurement with the study of political conflict and mobilisation, this chapter looks at why the topic of inequality became politicised at this particular time, and why was it framed in terms of the difference between the 1% and the rest. It argues the production of ‘inequality knowledge’ in the language of economics provided the basis for a new articulation of questions of distributive justice, but may have both narrowed and ‘nationalised’ the debated on inequality, foreclosing a more transversal understanding of inequalities on a global scale.
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Inequality in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Global and Historical Perspectives, 2019
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Political Representation and Citizenship in Portugal: Crisis and Renewal , 2020
Portugal started to suffer the impact of austerity measures as of 2010. Since 2011, these measure... more Portugal started to suffer the impact of austerity measures as of 2010. Since 2011, these measures were intensified in the context of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which agreed the terms of financial assistance to the government by the EU-IMF-ECB ‘troika’, bringing a set of harsh economic and social consequences to the life of Portuguese citizens.
Although it is always difficult to establish a clear causal link between the economic context and the mobilizations processes, in the past few years Portugal has experienced its strongest cycle of mobilization since the revolutionary period (1974- 1975). However, in contrast to other southern European countries, these social mobilisations did not result in the emergence of strong new political actors, or a sustained threat to the consolidated party system. Nevertheless, there were significant changes to the political landscape, particularly with the creation of an unprecedented strategic alliance between left-wing parties following the October 2015 elections. Seeking to explain these developments, this chapter complements our earlier work by tracing the evolution of the ‘dynamics of contention’ in Portugal since 2011, paying particular attention to facets of embeddeness and institutionalisation of Portuguese civil society and party systems.
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Rethinking Democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal, 2019
As the starting point for the so-called, 3rd wave of democratization, Portugal, together with Spa... more As the starting point for the so-called, 3rd wave of democratization, Portugal, together with Spain and Greece, provided the lens for the analysis of processes of democratization for decades to come. These southern European polities were also case studies for interrogating the consolidation of democracy, and of the imprints left by authoritarian pasts in political cultures and institutions. Less attention was paid to the role played in politics by the legacies and memories of their transitions to democracy, with the partial exception of the Spanish case, where the focus was very much on the active attempts to ‘forget’ the past. Four decades on, however, the return of political conflict and polarisation in the context of the ‘Great Recession’ – which has often taken the form of conflicts over the meaning of the past itself – has led to an increasing attention paid to the memories and legacies of transition. On the ground, a variety of social movements and political actors, some new, some old, have contributed to re-opening public debate about the founding moments of their respective democracies. This chapter investigates the ways in which the political actors most significantly involved in the cycle of contention that accompanied Portugal’s years of austerity sought to construct, invoke and mobilise the past of the transition.
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Portugal started to suffer the impact of austerity measures as of 2010. Since 2011, these measure... more Portugal started to suffer the impact of austerity measures as of 2010. Since 2011, these measures were intensified in the context of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which agreed the terms of financial assistance to the government by the EU-IMF-ECB ‘troika’, bringing a set of harsh economic and social consequences to the life of Portuguese citizens. Although it is always difficult to establish a clear causal link between the economic context and the mobilizations processes, in the past few years Portugal has experienced its strongest cycle of mobilization since the revolutionary period (1974-1975). However, in contrast to other southern European countries, these social mobilisations did not result in the emergence of strong new political actors, or a sustained threat to the consolidated party system. Nevertheless, there were significant changes to the political landscape, particularly with the creation of an unprecedented strategic alliance between left-wing parties following the October 2015 elections. Seeking to explain these developments, this chapter complements our earlier work by tracing the evolution of the ‘dynamics of contention’ in Portugal since 2011, paying particular attention to facets of embeddeness and institutionalisation of Portuguese civil society and party systems.
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In his contribution to the “What Is Inequality?” series, Pedro Ramos Pinto provides a critical hi... more In his contribution to the “What Is Inequality?” series, Pedro Ramos Pinto provides a critical history of both scholarly and public attention to inequality. Ramos Pinto examines the development of GDP as a mode of comparing inequality across nation-states as well as recent efforts at documenting changes in income distribution within countries. He concludes with a paradox: a principal focus on the income levels of individuals risks oversimplifying and misunderstanding inequality, but at the same time provides a concise and potent rallying cry for egalitarian movements that contest it.
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The Impact of History? Histories at the Beginning of the 21st Century
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West European Politics, Aug 2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2W9w3u7kwpna87Iccp3W/full#.VBmRdRbUKGQ
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Comment on 'History Manifested: making sense of unprecedented change' by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, ... more Comment on 'History Manifested: making sense of unprecedented change' by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, in the European Review of History, 22.5 (2015): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2015.1072502
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Contemporary European History, 2009
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Political Studies, 2013
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Historical Journal, 2008
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In Reducing Inequalities: A Sustainable Development Challenge, ed. Rémi Genevey, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Laurence Tubiana, New Delhi: TERI Press/AFD/IDDRI, 2013
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Books by Pedro Ramos Pinto
Papers by Pedro Ramos Pinto
In the wake of current political volatilities and economic uncertainties, the consequences of rising inequality have moved to the forefront of global concerns. Understanding inequality – its forms, impact and solutions – is a crucial component of contemporary public policy but any attempt to grapple with inequality must contend with its history, but also with thorny issues of measurement and the accuracy of social metrics. Recent important interventions have highlighted the historical dimensions of inequality. We have also seen considerable debate on how to define and measure inequality. However, debates on the relevance and history of inequality have seldom engaged with the rich tradition of the history of knowledge, of technologies of measurement, and their social and political imbrications. Doing so strikes us as of critical importance: from Charles Booth’s mapping of poverty in early 1900s London to contemporary debates about the relative merits of the GINI index, from the Human Development Index to the use of happiness as a metric of welfare, the measurement, quantification and exposition of social disparity has moulded public debate and policy commitments. Knowledge, condensed through particular and historical forms of measurement, has also been key in shaping changing social commitments and attitudes towards the injustices of inequality.
Although it is always difficult to establish a clear causal link between the economic context and the mobilizations processes, in the past few years Portugal has experienced its strongest cycle of mobilization since the revolutionary period (1974- 1975). However, in contrast to other southern European countries, these social mobilisations did not result in the emergence of strong new political actors, or a sustained threat to the consolidated party system. Nevertheless, there were significant changes to the political landscape, particularly with the creation of an unprecedented strategic alliance between left-wing parties following the October 2015 elections. Seeking to explain these developments, this chapter complements our earlier work by tracing the evolution of the ‘dynamics of contention’ in Portugal since 2011, paying particular attention to facets of embeddeness and institutionalisation of Portuguese civil society and party systems.
In the wake of current political volatilities and economic uncertainties, the consequences of rising inequality have moved to the forefront of global concerns. Understanding inequality – its forms, impact and solutions – is a crucial component of contemporary public policy but any attempt to grapple with inequality must contend with its history, but also with thorny issues of measurement and the accuracy of social metrics. Recent important interventions have highlighted the historical dimensions of inequality. We have also seen considerable debate on how to define and measure inequality. However, debates on the relevance and history of inequality have seldom engaged with the rich tradition of the history of knowledge, of technologies of measurement, and their social and political imbrications. Doing so strikes us as of critical importance: from Charles Booth’s mapping of poverty in early 1900s London to contemporary debates about the relative merits of the GINI index, from the Human Development Index to the use of happiness as a metric of welfare, the measurement, quantification and exposition of social disparity has moulded public debate and policy commitments. Knowledge, condensed through particular and historical forms of measurement, has also been key in shaping changing social commitments and attitudes towards the injustices of inequality.
Although it is always difficult to establish a clear causal link between the economic context and the mobilizations processes, in the past few years Portugal has experienced its strongest cycle of mobilization since the revolutionary period (1974- 1975). However, in contrast to other southern European countries, these social mobilisations did not result in the emergence of strong new political actors, or a sustained threat to the consolidated party system. Nevertheless, there were significant changes to the political landscape, particularly with the creation of an unprecedented strategic alliance between left-wing parties following the October 2015 elections. Seeking to explain these developments, this chapter complements our earlier work by tracing the evolution of the ‘dynamics of contention’ in Portugal since 2011, paying particular attention to facets of embeddeness and institutionalisation of Portuguese civil society and party systems.