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.
Justice, Rights, plurinationality, legal pluralism. These books are a celebration of diversity and, at the same time, an exploration of its complexity and difficulties. How indigenous justice is exercised in Bolivia and Ecuador? Is it possible, and under what conditions, an intercultural translation between differen...
Boaventura de Sousa Santos Lecture at Leverhulme, London 30 April 2012.
Audio file in English.
Topic: Toward a socio-legal theory of indignation
Boaventura de Sousa Santos analyses how struggles to extend ...
Video in Spanish. Short description:
In the interview Alberto Acosta talks about different topics related to the ongoing process of transformative constitutionalism in Ecuador, of which he is an actor as former president of the Constituent Assembly and leader of the left. He crit...
