This thematic area aims at deepening the understanding of the movement for the refoundation of the State and bottom up’s re-writing of constitutions. The former is being driven forward by identitary and social struggles in the global South around the democratisation and colonial and postcolonial liberation. Currently, constitutionalism as a formula for social ordering, rights distribution and organisation of the State’s power, has endured the effacing of political sovereignty and the ineffectiveness of citizenship. In face of the turbulence suffered by modern scales and values, national political communities have felt the mixed impact of transnational powers of political and economic actors and of the symbolic overloading of constitutional values. Both the legitimacy of, and the ability for, integration of the diverse sociabilities have been questioned. Many of the common denominators that have oriented States’ constituent process pronounced, under the affirmation of equality, the exclusion and invisibility of the difference of constituted peoples. Hence, the struggle for peoples´ liberty and self-determination presupposes the struggle for liberation from the traps of modern constitutions.
Below, some contributions to expand the discussion.
5 February 2014 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Title: Is it possible to occupy the Law ? Venue: Center for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Audience: Professors, Researchers (Post-Doc) and Doctoral and Master Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), particularly Center for Polit...
ALICE team member Tshepo Madlingozi has written a chapter entitled "Social movements and the Constitutional Court of South Africa" where he describes the impacts generated by Constitutional Court on social movement st...
We welcome this opportunity to announce the pre-release of the book Temas Aprofundados da Defensoria Pública (v.2). The book includes a chapter by the ALICE researcher Élida Lauris, a chapt...
