Intercultural Constitutionalism

Intercultural Constitutionalism
Author: Salvatore Bonfiglio
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0429685912

This book argues that the effective protection of fundamental rights in a contemporary, multicultural society requires not only tolerance and respect for others, but also an ethics of reciprocity and a pursuit of dialogue between different cultures of human rights. Nowadays, all cultures tend to claim an equitable arrangement that can be articulated in the terms of fundamental rights and in the multicultural organization of the State. Starting from the premise that every culture is and always was intercultural, this book elaborates a new, and more fundamentally, pluralist view of the relationship between rights and cultural identity. No culture is pure; from the perspective of an irreducible cultural contamination, this book argues, it is possible to formulate constitutional idea of diversity that is properly intercultural. This concept of intercultural constitutionalism is not, then, based on abstract principles, but nor is it bound to any particular cultural norm. Rather, intercultural constitutionalism allows the interpretation of rights, rules and legal principles, which are established in different contexts.

The Twilight of Constitutionalism?

The Twilight of Constitutionalism?
Author: Petra Dobner
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191633666

The concepts and values that underpin traditional constitutionalism are increasingly being challenged by political realities that place substantial power beyond the state. Among the few certainties of a global economy is the growing incongruity between the political (the world of things that need to be ordered collectively in order to sustain society) and the state (the major institution of authoritative political decision-making during modern times). The consequences, and possible remedies, of this double disjunction of politics and state and of state and constitution form the centre of an open debate about 'constitutionalism beyond the state'. The essays gathered in this collection explore the range of issues raised by this debate. The effects of recent changes on two of the main building blocks of constitutionalism - statehood and democracy - are examined in Parts I and II. Since the movement of overcoming statehood has, arguably, been advanced furthest in the European context, the question of the future of constitutionalist ideas in the framework of the EU provides the key theme of Part III. The remaining parts consider possible transformations or substitutes. The engagement of constitutions with international law offers one line of transmutation of constitutionalism (Part IV) and the diffusion of constitutionalism into separate social spheres provides an alternative way of pursuing constitutionalism in a new key (Part VI). Finally, the ability of the theory of global administrative law (examined in Part V) to offer an alternative account of the potential of jurisdictional control of global governing processes is examined. Through these explorations, the book offers cross-disciplinary insights into the impact of recent political and economic changes on modern constitutionalism and an assessment of the prospects for constitutionalism in a transnational environment.

Intercultural Spaces of Law

Intercultural Spaces of Law
Author: Mario Ricca
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2023-04-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3031274369

This book proposes an interdisciplinary methodology for developing an intercultural use of law so as to include cultural differences and their protection within legal discourse; this is based on an analysis of the sensory grammar tacitly included in categorizations. This is achieved by combining the theoretical insights provided by legal theory, anthropology and semiotics with a reading of human rights as translational interfaces among the different cultural spaces in which people live. To support this use of human rights’ semantic and normative potential, a specific cultural-geographic view dubbed ‘legal chorology’ is employed. Its primary purpose is to show the extant continuity between categories and spaces of experience, and more specifically between legal meanings and the spatial dimensions of people’s lives. Through the lens of legal chorology and the intercultural, translational use of human rights, the book provides a methodology that shows how to make space and law reciprocally transformative so as to create an inclusive legal grammar that is equidistant from social cultural differences. The analysis includes: a critical view on opportunities for intercultural secularization; the possibility of construing a legal grammar of quotidian life that leads to an inclusive equidistance from differences rather than an unachievable neutrality or an all-encompassing universal legal ontology; an interdisciplinary methodology for legal intercultural translation; a chorological reading of the relationships between human rights protection and lived spaces; and an intercultural and geo-semiotic examination of a series of legal cases and current issues such as indigenous peoples’ rights and the international protection of sacred places.

Intangible Cultural Heritage in International Law

Intangible Cultural Heritage in International Law
Author: Lucas Lixinski
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1246
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191668907

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the legal issues around intangible cultural heritage (also known as traditional cultural expressions or folklore). It explores both institutional and substantive responses the law offers to the safeguarding of intangible heritage, relying heavily on critiques internal and external to the law. These external critiques primarily come from the disciplines of anthropology and heritage studies. Intangible cultural heritage is safeguarded on three different levels: international, regional, and national. At the international level, the foremost instrument is the specific UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). At the regional level, initiatives are undertaken both in schemes of political and economic integration, a common thread being that intangible cultural heritage helps promote a common identity for the region, becoming thus a desirable aspect of the integration process. Domestically, responses range from strong constitutional forms of protection to rather weak policy initiatives aimed primarily at attracting foreign aid. Intangible heritage can also be safeguarded via substantive law, and, in this respect, the book looks at the potential and pitfalls of human rights law, intellectual property tools, and contractual approaches. It investigates how the law works and ought to work towards protecting communities, defined as those from where intangible cultural heritage stems, and to whom benefits of its exploitation must return. The book takes the critiques from anthropological and heritage studies into account in order to posit a re-shaped law, offering tools that can be valuable to both scholars and practitioners when understanding how to safeguard intangible heritage.

Decolonizing Constitutionalism

Decolonizing Constitutionalism
Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000914135

The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.

Taking Ethno-Cultural Diversity Seriously in Constitutional Design

Taking Ethno-Cultural Diversity Seriously in Constitutional Design
Author: Solomon A. Dersso
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004205357

Using a legal and multidisciplinary approach towards empirical and prescriptive analysis of contemporary minority rights standards, this book defends and elaborates a robust minority rights framework for articulating a constitutional design responsive to the claims of ethno-cultural groups in Africa.

Peacebuilding, Constitutionalism and the Global South

Peacebuilding, Constitutionalism and the Global South
Author: Kajit Bagu (John Paul)
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2019-07-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0429536097

This book presents the case that liberal constitutionalism in the global South is a legacy of colonialism and is inappropriate as a means of securing effective peace in regions that have been subject to recurrent conflict. The work demonstrates the failure of liberal constitutionalism in guaranteeing peace in the postcolonial global South. It develops an alternative, more compelling constitutionalism for peacebuilding in conflicted regions. This is based on constitutionalism that recognises plurality as a major feature in the global South. Drawing on events in Nigeria, it develops a constitutional model, based on Cognitive Justice, which could deliver peace by addressing historic, conceptual, legal, institutional and structural issues that have created social inequality and injustice. The study also incorporates insights from the development of plurinational constitutions in South America. The book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, academics and policy-makers with an interest in constitutional legal theory, peacebuilding and postcolonial studies

Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism in Latin America

Women, Gender, and Constitutionalism in Latin America
Author: Francisca Pou Giménez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 104001058X

This book discusses to what extent and how constitutional design and practice in Latin America have helped in combatting the subordination of women and LGBTQIA+ people. Covering 11 jurisdictions, the chapters identify the main elements of the constitutional gender order and survey jurisprudential and legislative developments in different areas, incorporating contextual analysis and references to history, political dynamics, social movements, feminist struggles, normative efficacy, and policy. In the context of a constitutionalism that has been celebrated as particularly innovative and socially engaged, the book assesses constitutional performance in the quest to supersede the separate gendered spheres tradition and the subordination of women and sexual minorities to heteronormative hegemony. It fills an important gap in the field of gender and constitutionalism, which has paid very little attention to Latin America compared to the Anglo-American legal world and continental Europe. It identifies regional trends, but also variables which account for the diversity of approaches in various jurisdictions. The book provides much-needed insight into matters that are relevant for legal and socio-legal scholars, an ever-growing number of social actors and movements, and all those interested in comparative constitutionalism and in the intersections between law and gender.

Human Rights

Human Rights
Author: Adamantia Pollis
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2000
Genre: Civil rights
ISBN: 9781555879792

5. Human environmental rights, Barbara Rose Johnston

The Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Latin America

The Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Latin America
Author: Conrado Hübner Mendes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 970
Release: 2022
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198786905

Constitutional law in Latin America embodies a mosaic of national histories, political experiments, and institutional transitions. No matter how distinctive these histories and transitions might be, there are still commonalities that transcend the mere geographical contiguity of these countries. This Handbook depicts the constitutional landscape of Latin America by shedding light on its most important differences and affinities, qualities and drawbacks, and by assessing its overall standing in the global enterprise of democratic constitutionalism. It engages with substantive and methodological conundrums of comparative constitutional law in the region, drawing meaningful comparisons between constitutional traditions. The volume is divided into two main parts. Part I focuses on exploring the constitutions for seventeen jurisdictions, offering a comprehensive country-by-country critique of the historical foundations, institutional architecture, and rights-based substantive identity of each constitution. Part II presents comparative analyses on the most controversial constitutional topics of the region, exploring central concepts in institutions and rights. The Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Latin America is an essential resource for scholars and students of comparative constitutional law, and Latin American politics and history Written by leading experts, it comprehensively examines constitutions, controversies, institutions, and constitutional rights in Latin America.