Democracy has evolved historically through intense social struggles and, frequently, it was also sacrificed in many of those struggles. Not always social movements promote democracy, but there is a contemporary tendency that many of them incorporate a renewed dimension of the democratic struggle, contributing to the ressignification of the practices and democratic theories at the beginning of this century. This paper intends to go beyond the unidirectional analyses with which the relations between social movements and democracy were treated in the democratic transitions, with the objective of questioning and enlarging the possible theoretical articulations between democracy and social subjects, taking as reference the existence of four "borders" that a lot of times are not overcome: the science one, the Nation-state one, the institutional one and the historical moment one.
social movements; democracy; spaciality of politics; scales; borders