At ICON-S 2017 in Copenhagen, members and friends of the Political Constitutional Theory (PolCon) network organised a panel subtitled ‘A View from Political Theory‘. We will retain the subtitle at ICON-S 2018 especially as political theory cannot be said to be over-reprsented in the papers presented at the conferences. The title of this year‘s panel...
“Your only right is to obey“: Securing Identity in the PRC
The quote in the title comes from a transcript of an interview with Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer in the PRC. ‘Your only right is to obey‘ is the ultimate, and ultimately inhumane, principle of authoritarian rule marking the collapse of obligation into obedience. It sees force making contact with the exposed, unprotected nerve...
Refugees, Politics and Identity: The Aesthetics of Political Resistance
The paper analyzes political resistance as an aesthetic phenomenon by taking as an example a protest in which two asylum seekers stabbed themselves in front of the Finnish Parliament House in the autumn 2017. An aesthetic reading of refugee activism allows critical insights into paradoxes of politics, identity and rights in the western juridico-political context....
The Aesthetics of Constitutional Space
Constitutional theory will by default subsume spatial phenomena under the territorial template of its statist paradigm. Constitutional space is, then, the ‘container‘ that is more or less compatible with the spatial expanse that the constitutionally delimited state occupies. Alternatively, constitutional space may be seen metaphorically as an organizational schematic, as a ‘constitutional architecture‘ in which...
The Political and Legal Challenge of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises: An Alternative Experience of the Political in Constitutionalism
Since 2001 the worker recuperated enterprises (ERTs) of Argentina have challenged the function, organisation, and normative basis of politics, law, and economics. This is a movement that frames its actions as a political struggle, and in so far as their conception of work rejects the structuring of work in response to market determinations, the ERT...