In recent years, conservative governments and their civil society allies have undermined international women’s rights treaties and SOGI rights initiatives and challenged domestic rights protections. The articles in this special issue grapple with these trends by analysing the ideologies, discourses, and strategies of contemporary anti-feminism in global and comparative contexts. Several prominent patterns emerge: the core significance of social hierarchy and biological essentialism to anti-feminist conservative thought; the polarizing demonization of feminists by religious conservatives and populist nationalists; the appropriation of rights discourses and advocacy tactics by anti-feminist campaigns; and the strategic importance of law and legal language as a terrain of rights contestation. Taken together, this research suggests that anti-feminism is not incidental to reactionary anti-democratic politics, but instead a constitutive element of political movements that seek to naturalize inequality and legally enforce conformity with conservative social norms.

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.

Conservative NGOs contesting women’s rights in the United Nations are on the rise, and their activity is increasingly described as an antifeminist backlash. This article focuses a new theoretical lens on this development: socialization. It argues that conservative NGOs’ socialization into transnational practices and the United Nations has played a significant part in facilitating the antifeminist backlash. To support this claim, the article examines socialization comprehensively, applying several analytical angles: its definition, directionality, mechanism, degree and effects. It also treats conservative NGOs’ socialization as both a process and an outcome. As a process, it unfolds horizontally, by conservative NGOs competitively mimicking feminist NGOs in two domains in particular: their manner of transnational organizing and their skilful use of the UN human rights framework. The article finds that conservative NGOs have socialized into transnational NGO practices and the regulative institutional rules of the United Nations, but not into all its constitutive norms. The chief effect of this kind of socialization is polarization. The article singles out and empirically illustrates three of its manifestations: the struggle for institutional spaces; zero-sum politics based on a sense of existential threat; and the use of a strong moralizing discourse.

This article examines the United Kingdom’s use of drones in an act of self-defence in a counter-terrorism operation. The government justified the targeted killing of a UK citizen in Syria – a country with which it was not at war at the time – with reference to existing laws and norms. In doing so, it contested a number of established concepts to justify its conduct as lawful activity. The article argues that modern weapons such as drones, which are used to address novel threats, lead to legal justification that in turn has the potential to create new laws. In this way, the intersection of norms, warfare and new technologies becomes a productive site of political contestation. The contribution of the article is twofold: empirically, it contributes to debates on targeted killing and discussions surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ‘imminence’ in the context of preventive self-defence in the United Kingdom; and theoretically, it adds to the constructivist literature by examining norm contestation and resulting normativity in this area. The article concludes that the legal justification in this particular instance has important implications for other emerging technologies that require discussions about how states justify their actions to conform with existing legal and normative frameworks.

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 revisits the legitimacy question as it touches the Nigerian 1999 Constitution, bringing to the discourse a review and application of pertinent theoretical perspectives on constitution making and constitutional legitimacy. This theoretical and pragmatic approach introduces a refreshing angle to the debate, revealing the paucity of any attempt to ascribe any legitimacy claim to a constitution with a doubtful normative claim and fraudulent attribution of its source and legitimacy to the people. The author finds the consent basis of constitutional legitimacy as most attractive to a divided state like Nigeria, and concludes by advocating the adoption of a blend of the principles of the constituent assembly and post sovereign constitution-making models for the production of a new people-driven and inclusive constitution to meet the needs of the Nigerian people.

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women’s international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’ equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this ‘norm spoiling’ strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ ‘global gag rule’; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’ speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.

Bill 21 is a highly contested law adopted in Quebec that bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their duties. Rather than analyse Bill 21 on its merits, the article treats it as a test case for global legal pluralism, examining how the validity of the law from an international perspective depends on the frames one uses to analyse it. It finds that a basic tension permeates the entire debate between a universalist vision of rights and a vision of rights as anchored in particular political configurations that demand a constant process of adaptation. That tension is visible in the dualist opposition between Canadian and international law; in the role of federalism as a significant mediating factor in the implementation of constitutional and international rights; and in the kind of majoritarian check on rights that manifests itself in the Canadian Charter of Rights’ ‘notwithstanding clause’. Throughout, the article explores how these tensions might be mediated in ways that do not simply oppose international and domestic law but seek to make the most of their interaction.

This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People’s Party’s efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party’s permissive acceptance of the Polish government’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article examines the existing possibilities and normative justification for sanctioning European political parties that make a complicit contribution to democratic backsliding.

This article addresses the conservative opposition to Iceland’s recently liberalised abortion laws. It argues that the opposition belongs to a long and rich history of conservatives willing to employ diverse measures to oppose progress. It further claims that the rhetoric employed has strong roots in the conservative tradition. This is demonstrated by the fact that the discourse in Iceland fits within Hirschman’s analytical framework, through which he analyses the main arguments of conservatives in the past. Icelandic conservatives argued that the proposed legislation would lead to the perverse effect that healthy foetuses would be aborted, that the legislation was futile, as the system was already well-functioning, and that it would jeopardise women by giving them the sole responsibility of deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy. The article sheds light on the underlying resistance to women’s bodily autonomy and right to self-determination. It also illustrates the importance of hierarchy and conservatism’s opposition to equality that is perceived to be taken too far. In light of global trends, where conservatives have tried to implement policies that are hostile towards women and women’s interests, it is important to explore national contexts where legislative success has been achieved despite global backlash.

In 2019, Thailand ratified the International Labour Organization Work in Fishing Convention to protect migrant fishers. The Thai government vigorously promoted the Convention among its constituents. Yet, despite the government’s proactivity, such norms have been weakened upon local translation. This phenomenon is not readily explained by existing norms research that pays scant attention to norms in the domestic space. To address this oversight, this article unpacks domestic processes of norm validation and makes a two-step argument. First, it argues that norm validation is crucial for instigating domestic implementation by allowing stakeholders to deliberate and contest the ‘appropriate’ application of norms. Second, it argues that the locally acquired normative understanding, as influenced by norm antipreneurs, or actors who defend the status quo, weakens norm implementation while the norms’ discursive strength is retained. In presenting the findings, this article contributes to the norms literature by illuminating a new life given to validated norms. The contribution also interrogates norms’ global–local dynamics by scrutinizing norm contestation and the extent to which it generates an internalized sense of legal obligation to implement international norms.

Before neoliberalism became global, it was an intellectual project that had a particular view of the power of constitutions to limit sovereign states, anchor economic freedoms and protect markets from democratic pressures for greater equality. In Latin America and the developing world, neoliberalism has long been identified with the political economy of the Washington Consensus. However, the comprehensive study of its legal foundations and institutional arrangements is still an area of limited scholarly attention. This article attempts to advance in that direction. By examining the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan, it explores a theory of neoliberal constitutionalism within Chile, the so-called first neoliberal laboratory. These authors visited the country during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), and were connected with top Chilean authorities as part of their global ambitions to implement their theoretical agendas in real-world scenarios. The article argues that Chile’s constitution-making process between 1973 and 1980 offered an on-site experiment in introducing neoliberal’s radical economic transformation. It addresses how the dictatorship’s natural law-based rule of law principles were compatible with the neoliberal constitutional ideology by supporting a distinctive view of the state’s role and designing the innovative institutional arrangements necessary to guarantee the market’s priority in the structural and rights dimension of the 1980 Constitution. In the wake of Chile’s recent constitutional change agenda, this article not only contributes to the existing debate by reflecting on the ideological origins of the still-persistent constitutional neoliberal features, but also works as a case study for evaluating new global turns towards authoritarian neoliberal politics.

This article argues that the tokenistic appropriation of categories such as gender and race have deprived them of their radical and transformative political and practical roots while facilitating their commodification as a luxury product that is consumed by the depoliticized and privileged. Such (ab)use of gender, as an analytical tool, similar to race and class, has been on the rise within progressive circles. However, with the rise of alt-right populism claiming to know and fight ‘feminism’, as well as the commodification of feminism by progressives, now more than ever a decolonial social reproductive theory is needed to help understand and delineate how women are oppressed in a plethora of intersectional ways based on race, class and ability among other traits, while engaging the specific material historical-constitutive structures, judicial-political and socio-economic dimensions of the world order, as well as the emergence of right-wing populism as white heteronormative backlash. This article argues for a feminist decolonial social reproductive theory that sees gender and racial hierarchy as part of capital’s dynamism (a product), which transforms the natural, social and material world, restructuring and evolving for the ordered extraction of surplus. Although this process may differ temporally and geographically, it nonetheless results in a constellation of class exploitation, governance and struggle that facilitates right-wing backlash and undermines the left’s response, thus obviating the need for decolonial social reproductive theory.

Presidential term limit provisions are often perceived as a feature of modern democratic systems. It has been argued that their existence is a key intervention mechanism to pre-empt some undemocratic outcomes associated with incumbency advantages. In 2008, the Constitution of Cameroon was amended to abolish the presidential term limit. More than ten years on, there are ostensible signs of a democratic decline. This article takes a retrospective look at the constitutional amendment to assess its constitutionality. It is argued that a conclusion on the constitutionality of the amendment may not be unequivocal. Nevertheless, there are substantial grounds for considering the constitutional change as a constitutional dismemberment. This is premised on the fact that, although the amendment followed the normal rules for constitutional amendments, the transformation amounted to a fundamental break with the constitutional commitment to democracy that underpinned the adoption of the 1996 Constitution.

Ius Constitutionale Commune in Latin America (ICCAL) is an academic endeavour that attempts to provide an account of the original Latin American path of transformative constitutionalism, comprising elements from national, transnational and international legal orders, and where the law is placed at the service of the normative trinity of constitutionalism, namely the rule of law, democracy and human rights. In this regard, ICCAL speaks of an Inter-American law that represents a new legal phenomenon, in a region where constitutionalist ideas have allegedly claimed new traction. In this article, I develop two main critiques that can be deemed challenges for an academic project that is still ‘under construction’, and provide an intellectual map of Latin American constitutionalism that could address these critiques and serve as a roadmap for studying potential Latin American contributions to debates around global constitutionalism.

This article examines the reasons for different constitutional approaches to platform governance across the Atlantic. By adopting a comparative perspective under the lens of digital constitutionalism, it analyses the move from converging to diverging strategies of the United States and the European Union to address platform governance. From a liberal approach inspired by the US framework at the end of the last century, the European Union has moved towards a constitutional democratic strategy as demonstrated, for instance, by the launch of the Digital Services Act. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States has reacted to the consolidation of platform governance by maintaining a liberal approach based on a vertical paradigm driven by the First Amendment. Given these democratic and liberal approaches, this article explains how the different constitutional premises of the United States and the European Union have produced diverging responses to the power of online platforms, thus underlining different expressions of digital constitutionalism across the Atlantic. The first section of the article introduces the rise of digital constitutionalism as the primary research angle to study the trans-Atlantic approaches to platform governance. The second section compares the European and US responses to the rise of platform powers. The third section focuses on the implications of these different constitutional strategies on a global scale.

Global regulatory competition is a recent phenomenon that confronts us in various different fields, ranging from food and chemical safety to climate change, and animal welfare to environmental law. The digital economy is not immune to this trend, and it seems highly unlikely that this will soon come to an end when we consider the radical differences between the European Union and the United States with respect to the importance they assign to the right to privacy and the right to freedom of speech. Nevertheless, despite their differences in content, it can be contended that they both tend to disregard the interest of others even though they have enough resources at their disposal to take them seriously. This becomes visible when the recent case law of the CJEU and the recent regulations such as the GDPR and the US CLOUD Act are taken into account. Their similar attitude to regulating for the globe raises the question of whether we are confronted with a new type of Eurocentrism, which is more contracted and introverted than the previous expansionist version. The article argues that unilateralism should be a selfless one and that it should necessarily consider outsiders if it is to acquire legitimacy.

A state should be deemed to be enjoying fiscal sovereignty where it is effectively empowered, without pressure or coercion, to make all policy decisions required to run the state machinery and satisfy the fundamental needs of its people (at the very least), both individual and collective. A state’s effective policy and decision-making power is effectively curtailed where: (1) it has been substituted in these functions by a third state or an organ of that state; (2) it is prevented from taking a particular action, such as unilateral default; (3) it is forced to violate fundamental domestic laws, including its constitution or the result of a referendum; or (4) external pressure is exerted against its government and institutions, with the aim of creating volatility and uncertainty concerning its finances so it succumbs to such pressure.

This article approaches current constitutional conservatism in Europe, focusing on the limits of equality rights regimes. These frameworks, it is argued, provide little leverage for positive discrimination to become articulated, let alone for them to be implemented by public policies. Equality regimes are further disentangled by means of a multidimensional reading of legal orders: particular attention is devoted to international human rights law (IHRL) and European Jus Commune that may inspire shifts in constitutional thinking at domestic levels. In that sense, equality frameworks steadily open up towards an inclusive understanding of human rights based on the transformative forces of international law. A pluralistic idea of those subjected to such regimes will be embraced, hence developing a clearer conception of rights holder categories and ultimately peoples affected in daily practice, particularly minorities. A dedicated focus is placed on ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic grounds. This may similarly concern intersectionalities and the complexities of overlapping grounds of discrimination. It is stressed that equality is best addressed by means of a multivariate approach to legal orders, their dynamics and ultimately virtuous effects of application.