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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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