Call for contributions: IACL World Congress on Constitutional Law
Open workshop proposal, IACL World Congress on Constitutional Law, Johannesburg 5-9 December 2022. Proposers: Dr Ruvi Ziegler (Reading), Prof. Patricia Mindus (Uppsala), co-chairs of the IACL ‘membership and exclusion under constitutions’ research group
Constitutional transformations and the ‘other’: Reproduction and routinisation of marginalisation, exclusion, and invisibility
The state as a self-governing polity in international law, and its constitution, are premised on the existence of a polity, the demos, with defined members. The geographical demarcation, underscored by a defined territory with (physical) borders, is thus accompanied by legal and normative borders. Legal and political conversations surrounding constitutional questions oftentimes take place in exclusionary fashions, engaging only (some) citizens and failing to consider the ‘other’ – the minoritized citizen, the asylum-seeker or refugee, the stateless person. Marginalisation, exclusion, and invisibility can characterise constitutional structures and affect constitutional practices. The workshop seeks to critically probe such structures and practices from a comparative perspective, and to consider how constitutional transformation can rectify them.
In so doing, it will explore the boundaries of exclusion; constitutionalism and the reproduction of invisibility; and comparative constitutionalist perspectives on the routinisation of marginalisation, namely the contribution of (legal and social) power relations to de jure and de facto marginalisation.
We are open to all contributions that fall within the overarching theme of the workshop. We particularly welcome abstracts pertaining to three sub-themes:
• Constitutional intersectional approaches to asylum-seekers and refugees, particularly regarding marginalised groups: LGBT+, ethnic and linguistic minorities, and unaccompanied children
• Constitutional protection and de facto/ de jure statelessness, particularly addressing political exclusion, voice/voicelessness, stateless children
• Political ‘othering’: participation of marginalised/excluded groups
Please apply with your expression of interest, a proposed title and abstract via https://wccl.co.za/workshops/ for Workshop 16 by Thursday June 30th at 12 noon GMT.