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Constitutions and Crisis






In his Editorial in New Left Review Nov Dec 2011, 'Spring confronts Winter' Mike Davis wrote: " Our analogue minds simply cannot solve all the differential equations generated by the incipient fragmentation of the Eurozone or a blown gasket in the Chinese growth engine. While the explosion on Wall Street in 2008 was more or less accurately foreseen by various experts, what is now rushing towards us is well beyond the prediction of any Cassandra or, for that matter, three Karl Marxes." Letting that quotation hold the place of a specific sense of 'crisis' our title 'Constitutions and Crisis' proposes an examination of the constitutional/ political sphere in the present conjuncture. Alternatively it proposes engagement with the problem of crisis in constitution-making and unmaking, leading into questions of rights, citizenship, the constitution of the political and the political constitution of European modernity. What is it to think about the crisis 'from a constitutional perspective'? Does it assume a political register, or a legal one, or a coupling of registers? Or does it involve something altogether different as 'constitutional' comes unhinged from its traditional moorings? If indeed it does do that; if such moorings were not always only features of fables concerning capitalist and colonialist violence.


Abstracts:

  • John Wolfe Ackerman

  • Helen Carr

  • Emilios Christodoulidis

  • Marinos Diamantides

  • Ruth Dukes

  • Başak Ertür

  • Tarik Kochi

  • Tshepo Madlingozi

  • Pablo Marshall

  • Stewart Motha

  • Marc Neocleous



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