In the 1980s, she became an active member of several civil society movements that challenged the official policies of the Titoist regime. In 1983, she was among the signers of a petition demanding the abolition of death penalty in Yugoslavia. Next year, she organized a petition of solidarity with Serbian intellectuals that were trialed in Belgrade for opposing the government policies. She became one of the co-editors of the alternative journal "Nova revija". In 1987, she was among the co-founders of the Yugoslav section of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. During the JBTZ-trial in 1988, when four Slovenian journalist were arrested by the Yugoslav People's Army and accused of revealing military secrets, she was elected on the board of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, which soon became the biggest civil society platform in Yugoslavia, with more than 100,000 individual members. The Committee organized the first free mass demonstration in Slovenia after 1945, held in May 1988 on the central Congress Square of Ljubljana. She was active in several civil activities throughout the Slovenian Spring, a process of political democratization between 1988 and 1990, which led to the independence of Slovenia in 1991. Afterwards, Puhar returned to journalist work and started writing extensively on the history of Slovenian and Yugoslav dissidents between 1945 and 1990. Since 1994, she is member of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), sponsored by the Council of Europe. She later described the emergence of democratic movements, punk and art groups, feminist, lesbian and gay rights groups in Slovenia as causing traditionalists in other members of then Yugoslavia calling Slovenia 'selfish, greedy, separatist, fascists, Germans' etc. deserving to be punished. Alenka Puhar first gained recognition as a translator. In 1967 her translation of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was published by a major publisher in Ljubljana: it was one of the first official editions of the novel in any of the Communist countries. She also translated works by Gore Vidal, Frederick Forsyth and Wole Soyinka to Slovene. In 1982, she published her most well-known book, "The Primary Text of Life" ("Prvotno besedilo življenja"). The book, the title of which is taken from one of Ivan Cankar's short stories, was a combination of psychohistory and social history, in which she analyzed the condition of children in the Slovene Lands in the 19th century.