Call for Papers - Marie Skłodowska-Curie-funded Workshop



SOVEREIGNTY AND AUTONOMY IN PROCESSES OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE



Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL<http://cisrul.blog/>) at the University of Aberdeen



DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: FRIDAY 11TH JANUARY

WORKSHOP DATE: FRIDAY 1ST FEBRUARY 2019



The workshop will explore how sovereignty and autonomy figure in processes of constitutional change, taking a variety of intellectual perspectives and focusing on a range of contexts. Processes of constitutional change include not only moments in which new constitutions are adopted, but also academic, activist and judicial proposals for new constitutional frameworks, reinterpretations of existing constitutions, and less formal projects that constitute communities in other ways. Political communities can be refigured through such processes, reworking both constitutional ideas and their enactment in specific situations, conjuring new forms of inclusion and exclusion, as well as new relationships between institutions and subjects.



Though many written and unwritten constitutions in the world today attribute sovereignty unambiguously to states associated with nations, we propose contrasting these to alternative constitutional projects, in past and present, that look to distribute sovereignty differently. Examples include the re-founding of Bolivia as a Plurinational State, Maori claims to sovereignty, Kurdish models of 'democratic confederalism,' and the Mexican tradition of 'free and sovereign municipalities'. Some of these projects - particularly indigenous movements in the English-speaking settler states - use the language of sovereignty, while others - such as municipal and indigenous movements in Latin American - favour the language of autonomy. Nonetheless, and despite many other differences, they tend to share a view that sovereignty centralized in states facilitates the domination or exclusion of indigenous, minority, or otherwise marginalised communities, and call for sovereignty to be redistributed, through processes of constitutional change, in ways that might serve to emancipate those communities. In recent years, they also tend to claim that, while discourses of human and communitarian rights have ushered in a trend towards liberal multiculturalism and constitution-making that 'recognises' the diversity of 'the people' or of 'the nation' through equality and minority rights, such projects have generally failed to eradicate hierarchies based on race, class, gender, culture, and other constructions of difference, because they have fallen short of recognising the authority of indigenous, minority, or marginalised communities to establish their own systems and institutions of governance. As such, these alternative projects feature conceptions of sovereignty and autonomy that differ sharply from the nation-state project, and the political and normative assumptions on which it is built.



This workshop calls for papers that address the relationship between processes of constitutional change and the re(con)figuration of sovereignty and/or autonomy. How are claims to sovereignty or autonomy made by indigenous, minority, or marginalised communities similar to and different from claims made by states? What are the differences between claims to sovereignty and to autonomy? More broadly, how are social, economic, and other hierarchies maintained or disrupted by processes of constitutional change, and how might processes which problematize the distribution of sovereignty lead to a more just world? The workshop calls for work at the intersection of normative and empirical scholarship, considering the political and ethical implications of processes of constitutional change.



Speakers will include Professor Nancy Postero<http://anthro.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/faculty-profiles/nancy-postero.html> (University of California) who has written extensively on the processes of constitutional change that recast Bolivia as a Plurinational State.



Please send abstracts to CISRUL Director Dr Trevor Stack by Friday 11th January at [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>



This project has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 754326.


The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013683.
Tha Oilthigh Obar Dheathain na charthannas claraichte ann an Alba, Air. SC013683.

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