LAUSR

of the transition, Greek military leaders were put on trial. Indeed, these developments make Greece look more like Portugal than Spain. In Portugal, civil society overthrew the dictatorship while the army was away in Africa fighting “colonial wars,” and as part of the transition, the old regime was subjected to an extensive purge. More importantly, I wonder if a more expansive look at the universe of social movements captured in the book would have cast some cases in a different light. Spain is a case in point. Much of the attention to Spanish social movements in the book is given to antiausterity movements, such as Podemos (We Can) and the Indignados (the Indignants), which fit a dominant theme of the book—that democracies born via political pacts tend to foster more radical social movements. Yet in recent years, the country has also seen the extraordinary rise of the Spanish LGBT movement, which succeeded in making Spain only the third country in the entire world to legalize same-sex marriage when it did so in 2005. Spain’s Movement for the Recovery of the Historical Memory also comes to mind. A genuine civil society phenomenon, this movement has in recent years done more than any other analogous movement in Southern Europe to expose the human rights abuses of authoritarian rule in the region. And the same economic crisis of 2011–13 that gave birth to the “radical” Podemos also generated the centrist political party Cuidadanos (Citizens). It is hard to square the rise and success of these movements in a political system thought to be inauspicious to social movement activism. Finally, there is always a tendency in books asserting the long-term consequences of “critical junctures” to oversell their case. They underestimate the capacity of democracies to recalibrate and the possibility that other critical junctures might create new opportunities for social movement activism and participation.My point is not that the legacies and memories of democratic transitions do not matter, but rather that their impact is not as deterministic as we often make it to be. A lot can happen in the wake of a democratic transition that can upend our best-laid theoretical assumptions.