Collective labour rights, including the right to organize and strike, were recognized in the principles of the International Labour Organization (ILO) as fundamental rights. Despite their importance, different countries enacted legislation that included a ban on police organization in trade unions or a ban just on police strikes. The right of police officers to organize and strike is of particular importance nowadays at a time of increased public scrutiny and large-scale protests over incidents of extra-judicial killing by police. There is a need to recognize collective rights for police officers in order to improve working conditions and organizational justice at work for them as a way of moderating officers’ perspectives of public hostility and improving their capability to carry out their duties. Another benefit of recognizing a right to organize is the union’s capacity to advance important values, including avoiding racism and violence and assuring the compliance of individual officers with the ethics and code of conduct expected from police officers. This article seeks to address the unique topic of the linkage between the collective labour rights of police officers and varieties of constitutionalism in these critical times. It introduces two potential approaches in this regard: (1) global labour constitutionalism; and (2) militaristic labour constitutionalism. The former implements international standards set by the ILO as a basis for constitutionalism while the latter emphasizes domestic issues and the need to maintain the public order and security of citizens. The article examines the possibility of applying global labour constitutionalism as a basis for recognizing collective rights for police officers.

In 2021, the Chilean Convention became the first constitution-making body with gender parity. However, the draft – which reflected many gender-related norms – was rejected by 61.89 per cent of voters in the exit plebiscite of 2022. In this article, we argue that although parity constitutionalism has promise and, in the Chilean case, was linked to gender-related outcomes in the constitutional text, parity’s promise may fail to materialize. We thus caution against a naïve view of parity constitutionalism as one of the key legacies of the 2020–22 Chilean constitution-making process.

The constitutional design of Bangladesh is characterized by an ambivalent choice: it aspires to establish a republican yet a Bengalee state by putting itself in the conflicting terrain within the demos–ethnos binary. This article aims to examine the implication of this problematic choice along all three axes of the constitution’s elemental parts: its identity, rights and structure. While the identity element of the Bangladesh Constitution embodies the ethno-nationalist vision of the Bengalee state that transforms demos into ethnos, its rights and structural aspects reflect its republican promise to transform ethnos into demos. Contemporary scholarship seeks to confront the exclusionary dimension of the ethno-nationalistic choice in Bangladesh but ends up accepting ethnos as a politically superior value. Such an approach brings us to the politics of difference and, with that, undermines the integrationist potential of the republican constitution. In response, this article defends the republican promise of the Bangladesh Constitution while arguing that what we need in Bangladesh is the ‘de-ethnicization’ of the republic, one that can be achieved by transforming ethnos into demos and not the other way around.

Federations present difficulties for prevailing theories of constituent power, which usually attribute ultimate constitution-making authority to a singular people. This article examines how a ‘pluralized’ constituent power functions in federal systems. It argues that the operation of plural constituent power in federations reflects a distinctive model of constitutional formation according to which a ‘polity of polities’ is established and sustained through the maintenance of a tension between plurality and unity.

The laws of war and international human rights law (IHRL) overlap, often with competing obligations. When two or more areas of the law overlap, political agents attempt to address these areas of ambiguity with interstitial rules. However, a lack of consensus on interstitial rules can destabilise the law, leading to increased contestation of legal norms and principles. Such is the case for international law in counterterrorism. Prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks (9/11), international agreements and US domestic practices placed counterterrorism within the framework of law enforcement. After 9/11, the Bush Administration replaced law enforcement with armed conflict and the laws of war as the dominant paradigm for counterterrorism, but this decision, among other legal justifications in the War on Terror, has been contested by the international legal community. As IHRL still applies in law enforcement operations, international law in counterterrorism now sits within a contested overlap of IHRL and the laws of war. The contestation of US policies in the War on Terror, including the use of drone strikes in particular, is a product of this unresolved overlap and the lack of clear interstitial rules. Lacking these rules, US counterterrorism policies risk undermining the rule of law.

The various and diverse academic responses to the Conference on the Future of Europe’s efforts at democratic renewal, including those by Ben Crum, Markus Patberg and Sandra Seubert, speak not only to the lack of a clear institutional locus or pathway associated with the Conference, but also to differing understandings of the basic conditions of existence – or political ontology – of the European Union. These differing understandings are reflected in different attitudes to the European Union’s constitutional standing and prospects. This article explores how the special place of constitutional retrofitting in the European Union – of reconstructing and reimagining an originally pre-constitutional system in constitutional terms – helps to illuminate the different understanding of political ontology in play, and helps clarify what is at stake in the continuing debate over fundamental reform.

This article addresses the bastardization of constitutional law in Argentina and the corrosive power of legacies of authoritarianism. It offers a genealogy of the use by Argentina’s Supreme Court of self-restraint canons from the time when they were borrowed from the US Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century. Partly resulting from the country’s experiences with military rule, the court transformed or expanded these canons, which entailed a gradual depreciation of statutes as the (uneasy) cornerstone of constitutionalism. Based on a fresh dataset and employing narrative and network analysis, the article focuses on a slogan the court has invoked since the 1960s: invalidating a rule is a matter of extreme institutional gravity and hence a strategy of last resort. Under the 1976–83 dictatorship, the court applied the slogan to various rules, including those passed by the military. It thus invoked familiar canons outside its scope conditions, conveying an illusion of constitutional regularity by masking the abnormal in acceptable garb and contributing to the regime’s legitimation. While the democratic court abandoned the most blatant expressions of authoritarianism, connections persisted, manifesting in the frequent citations to the dictatorship court’s use of the slogan and its extension to any rule. Authoritarian legacies die hard.

In A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice and the European Convention on Human Rights, Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan reconstruct Kant’s legal philosophy as a program of cosmopolitan legal order (CLO). A CLO is defined as a multi-level, judicialized, transnational system of rights protection that confers on all persons, by virtue of their humanity, the entitlement to challenge the rights-regarding decisions of public officials, who are under an obligation to assure the equal juridical status of all. The authors illustrate this claim with respect to the development of the ECtHR and the Court of Justice of the European Union. While generally agreeing with their argument, I claim that they minimize the republican aspects of Kant’s political philosophy in favour of strong judicial review. After outlining republican and democratic objections, I claim that their book illustrates a model that I call ‘dialogic constitutionalism’. Dialogic constitutionalism does not neglect legislative authority, but places it in a conversation with judicial authority, whether domestic or transnational; such conversations can serve to upgrade standards of rights protection over time and are not frozen precommitments. Constitutions also have a representative function of standing for the intergenerational continuity of the people, whereas legislatures are bound by electoral cycles.

Anarchy is the conceptual cornerstone of international relations theory and international law scholarship. Anarchy is described as the ordering principle of the international system, it is used as a variable that explains state behaviour, and the international legal order is depicted as anarchic and decentralised. This article questions this privileged status of anarchy. It challenges the designation of anarchy as the ‘ordering principle’ of the international system, and proposes an alternative theoretical construct – the Constitutive Regime of the International System – that performs the functions of the ‘ordering principles’ of the international system. This Constitutive Regime consists of three components. The first is a principle of differentiation that identifies the constituent units of the international system. The second is a theory of world order that prescribes policies and principles that are necessary to maintain order within the system, and the third are the secondary rules of international law that generate the international law-making and law-enforcement processes. In short, the Constitutive Regime provides a novel theoretical vernacular to understand and conceptualise the normative foundations of the international system.

This article examines the development of the doctrine of the ‘permanent constituent power’ in Mexico. This doctrine reflects a long tradition in constitutional theory according to which the exercise of constituent power is a one-time event: once a constitution is adopted, there will be no legal mechanism in place for the exercise of the people’s original constitution-making authority. This view is nonetheless in tension with a notion that has also been historically embraced by liberal constitutionalism: that the people has an inalienable right to alter the form of government. The constitutional provisions that reflect that idea, we will see, can have important implications in terms of the nature and scope of the amending authority and, at the same time, point toward alternative mechanisms for the exercise of constituent authority. By closely examining the operation of those kinds of provisions in the Mexican constitution, we seek to illustrate a tension central to the liberal constitutional tradition and to suggest a way out of it. In so doing, we aim to draw some lessons from the Mexican case that can contribute to current discussions about constituent power and fundamental constitutional change in liberal constitutional orders.

In Practice Theory and International Relations, Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost make a useful distinction between ‘praxis’ and ‘practices’ and correctly insist on the importance of describing the identity of distinct practices. They also make the important point that practices have ethical value for their participants. There is much to like about Lechner and Frost’s argument, including its solid philosophical grounding. However, from the perspective of a social scientist, there are some points of concern as well. First, while they champion ‘description’, they settle for ‘naming’ practices. Proper description requires more attention to detail than what the authors offer in the book. Second, the authors appear to discriminate between social practices in spatial terms rather than in functional terms. As a consequence, they end up with a description of the practices of international relations, where the different practices are all animated by the same value of freedom. As such, Lechner and Frost offer a reductionist interpretation of the ethical significance of international practices. Third, the authors push their anti-foundationalism too far. When one interprets the (ethical) significance of social practices, it is useful to bring on board philosophical–anthropological models, even if only because it opens up one’s interpretive horizons.

What is the significance of the School Strike for Climate from an international constitutional perspective? In this article, I compare the School Strike for Climate with the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20. Both these movements became necessary because of gaps in their countries’ respective domestic and international legal frameworks – what I term constitutionalism gaps. The immediate cause of each protest was how state and non-state actors exploited these constitutionalism gaps in the existing legal framework. Protests in Hong Kong were triggered by the attempt to enact an Extradition Law that threatened people’s autonomy, whereas the School Strike for Climate is a response to the failure of the state to deliver climate justice. Both these movements use similar strategies of advocacy and they have relied extensively on new technology. Based on this comparison, I argue that the School Strike for Climate promotes procedural and substantive values of constitutionalism at the international level, similar to the Hong Kong Protests at the domestic level. Through the School Strike for Climate, people seek to engage directly in the transnational legal process. In attempting to bridge the constitutionalism gap at the international level, the School Strike for Climate promotes values of global constitutionalism.

This article investigates how the European and Inter-American human rights regimes have developed communication practices to create loyalty. It argues that communication departments exercise essential functions, in particular by creating diffuse support for international courts. By relying on theoretical analyses developed by Albert O. Hirschman and David Easton, it identifies how international courts can create loyalty through, first, fostering awareness about the existence of the court among the general public, and, second, the establishment of supportive communities around the court through shared practices. By drawing on semi-structured interviews, the comparative analysis of the European and Inter-American human rights regime illustrates both the professionalization of communication actors and the evolution of specific communication strategies in times of backlash. The empirical insights derived from semi-structured interviews with communication officials highlight how they have succeeded in expanding their audiences, but struggle with activating communities of practice. Ultimately, the rise of visual media formats and story-telling narratives might be the most promising tool to portray a more positive and engaging image of the institution.

There is a need for the field of global constitutionalism to consider a wider array of voices, such as women’s voices and perspectives from the Global South. Here, I argue that global constitutionalism must pay attention not only to a wider array of human perspectives, but also to non-human perspectives and to different understandings of what the law is and can be. Evaluating how international law categorizes the environment and non-human animals as things or objects to be exploited for human needs, I argue that posthuman feminism provides an alternative epistemic frame for rethinking both global constitutionalism and international law.