CfP: Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Constitutionalism from below and for the next world system

by | 8 Nov 2024

Guest edited by Carys Hughes (University of East London, U.K.) and Ben Manski (George Mason University, U.S.). 

This Special Collection will advance an emergent field of scholarly research, which is coalescing around the concept of “revolutionary constitutionalism”, understood as the participatory practices of a social movement in deliberating, articulating, and constituting a new social order. This field of inquiry is in part a response to our current conjuncture and the failures of existing systems to address the multiple, intensifying and interconnected crises we face. Where the global social movement of the turn of the millennium declared ‘another world is possible’, scholarship on revolutionary constitutionalism examines both the sources as well as the emerging institutional contours and systemic designs of this other possible world.

Constitutions and constitution-making processes have often been understood as a province of technocrats and elites, removed from real-world struggles of the great multitudes of the world’s peoples. The articles in this collection will counter this persistent bias, drawing on scholarly studies of popular constitutionalism, revolutionary constitutionalism, the sociology of constitutions, prefigurative legalities, radical governance, systemic movements, and next system design to show the power and the relevance of constitutional politics in wider struggles for democracy, justice and ecological sustainability. 

Submissions should address at least some aspects of  the following questions:

  • What can be learned from movements from below that seek to systematically reorder the relationships between human beings, communities, institutions, the state, ecosystems, and the world system?
  • What are their constitutional designs for the next world system or its subsystems?
  • How do they develop them, articulate them, mobilise for them, establish them, enact them, practice them, and/or defend them?

We seek contributions from community-based scholar activists, as well as those in the academy. 

We are particularly seeking contributions from writers based in and writing from perspectives of the Global South, though we also welcome contributions from scholars of all regions, who are grappling with these questions. 

This Special Collection is a project of a new International Research Collaborative on Revolutionary Constitutionalism, supported by Next System Studies at George Mason University. 

Submission instructions and deadlines

Interested authors should send a 250-word abstract to Special Collection Editors Dr Carys Hughes (carys.hughes@uel.ac.uk) and Dr Ben Manski (bmanski@gmu.edu) by 20 December 2024. Invitations for full paper submissions will be sent in mid-January 2025, and full papers will be due by end of March 2025.

Abstract submission deadline: 20 December 2024

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