Publications

Deciphering the Genome of Constitutionalism: The Foundations and Future of Constitutional Identity

Constitutional identity has become one of the most important and hotly contested concepts in contemporary constitutional theory and practice. It has been repeatedly invoked in debates concerning EU integration, constitutional reform and revolution, and the spread of ethno-nationalist populism, democratic backsliding, and constitutional retrogression. Yet, the concept’s precise foundations, meaning, scope, and dynamics of continuity and change remain somewhat unclear and under-explored. This contemporary and definitive volume aims to address this stark gap. Featuring some of the world’s leading scholars of comparative constitutionalism, constitutional theory, and constitutional politics, this book provides a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind theoretical, comparative, normative, and empirical account of the concept of constitutional identity. It will be of great interest to scholars, students, jurists, and constitutional drafters alike.

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The Judicial System of Russia

The Judicial System of Russia paints a portrait of the courts of the Russian Federation under Putin, how they work in practice, and what shapes the behaviour of its judges. It stresses the dual nature of a judicial system, where ordinary cases are for the most part handled fairly, but where cases of interest to powerful persons are subject to influence–a common situation in authoritarian states. In so doing, the authors trace the origins of some contemporary practices to the Soviet past, but also identify novelties. They pay close attention to the struggles of reformers to make the courts fairer and more efficient, along with the measures taken to ensure that judges conform to the expectations of their political masters. This means dealing with the evolution of judicial governance, including the selection, promotion, and disciplining of judges.

In studying the actual operation of the courts, the authors take a socio-legal approach, emphasizing how different players (petitioners, respondents, lawyers, prosecutors, accused, judges) behave and why. This means dealing with the full gamut of courts from justices of the peace through the Supreme and Constitutional Courts and analysing their conduct in ordinary civil disputes, criminal cases, business disputes, administrative justice (claims against state officials), and constitutional matters. The authors also examine the relation of the public to the courts, including its readiness to litigate disputes despite generally negative views of the courts.

This analysis of the administration of justice in Russia covers both the Constitutional Amendments of 2020 and developments relating to the first months of the 2022 War in Ukraine. It is a must read for academics, practitioners, and all those with an interest in comparative courts and Russia’s judicial system.

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The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation

Arguments about liberalism’s meanings, endurance, imminent death, or revival are widespread in modern political thought. But what effect do these preoccupations with liberalism have on the way political questions are taken up?

In The Liberalism Trap, Menaka Philips argues that the focus on liberalism has become a customary limit on our political imaginations. To examine the costs of that custom, Philips turns to John Stuart Mill-the so-called paradigmatic liberal. As she argues, Mill’s famed liberal status is habitually substituted for his political arguments such that the now standard association of Mill with liberalism determines how and why he is read. Philips, however, takes a break from that ready association. Her comparative reading of Mill’s work concerning women’s emancipation, class reform, and the British Empire recovers a thinker guided not by the ideological certainties he is often made out to represent, but by a politics of uncertainty-a politics which generated radical, gradualist, and paternalist strategies throughout his proposals on domestic and imperial questions.

By reading Mill against the limits of liberalism, Philips draws out the possibilities and risks of Mill’s own political practice, while inviting a critical evaluation of the customs of interpretation that shape contemporary political thought.

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We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age

A rallying call for extending human rights beyond our physical selves—and why we need to reboot rights in our data-intensive world.

Our data-intensive world is here to stay, but does that come at the cost of our humanity in terms of autonomy, community, dignity, and equality? In We, the Data, Wendy H. Wong argues that we cannot allow that to happen. Exploring the pervasiveness of data collection and tracking, Wong reminds us that we are all stakeholders in this digital world, who are currently being left out of the most pressing conversations around technology, ethics, and policy. This book clarifies the nature of datafication and calls for an extension of human rights to recognize how data complicate what it means to safeguard and encourage human potential.

As we go about our lives, we are co-creating data through what we do. We must embrace that these data are a part of who we are, Wong explains, even as current policies do not yet reflect the extent to which human experiences have changed. This means we are more than mere “subjects” or “sources” of data “by-products” that can be harvested and used by technology companies and governments. By exploring data rights, facial recognition technology, our posthumous rights, and our need for a right to data literacy, Wong has crafted a compelling case for engaging as stakeholders to hold data collectors accountable. Just as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights laid the global groundwork for human rights, We, the Data gives us a foundation upon which we claim human rights in the age of data.

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War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution

An expansive history of how an economic shock a half century ago created a world that is addicted to mass migration.

The oil shock of 1973 changed everything. It brought the golden age of American and European economic growth to an end; it destabilized Middle Eastern politics; and it set in train processes that led to over one hundred million unexpected–and unwanted–immigrants.

In War, Work, and Want, Randall Hansen asks why, against all expectations, global migration tripled after 1970. The answer, he argues, lies in how the OPEC Oil crisis transformed the global economy, Middle Eastern geopolitics and, as a consequence, international migration. The quadrupling of oil prices and attendant inflation destroyed economic growth in the West while flooding the Middle East with oil money. American and European consumers, their wealth drained, rebuilt their standard of living on the back of cheap labor–and cheap migrants. The Middle East enjoyed the benefits of a historic wealth transfer, but oil became a poisoned chalice leading to political instability, revolution, and war, all of which resulted in tens of millions of refugees. The economic, and migratory, consequences of the OPEC oil crisis transformed the contours of domestic politics around the world. They fueled the growth of nationalist-populist parties that built their brands on blaming immigrants for collapsing standards of living, willfully ignoring the fact that mass immigration was the effect, not the cause, of that collapse.

In showing how war (the main driver of refugee flows), work (labor migrants), and want (the desire for ever cheaper products made by migrants) led to the massive upsurge in global migration after 1973, this book will reshape our understanding of the past half-century of global history.

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Sleeping Dogs: Quebec and the Stabilization of Canadian Federalism after 1995

What happened to the Quebec sovereignty movement after 1995? In Sleeping Dogs, Andrew McDougall reveals how a change in federalist strategy, combined with an improving political context, helped Canada stabilize its federal system and bury the “Quebec question” for the foreseeable future.

The book identifies five potential reasons the Quebec sovereignty movement lost momentum and argues that all contributed to a political environment that benefited federalists. McDougall explores topics of elite accommodation, generational change, changing identity politics, economic globalization, and constitutional fatigue. He argues that Canada’s federalist political elites have capitalized on these developments to stabilize the country by dropping the national question – even when they might still hold very different visions of the Constitution. Building on “constitutional abeyance” theory, the author conceives of this strategic change as the restoration of a constitutional abeyance among federalist actors. Considering recent history in light of subsequent developments, Sleeping Dogs is a timely and important attempt to understand the evolving situation in Quebec and Canadian federalism.

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“We Are in Charge Here”: Inuit Self-Government and the Nunatsiavut Assembly

Powerful, innovative Indigenous self-governance regimes are increasingly important players in Canadian politics, but little academic work has been done on their structure, operation, and effectiveness. “We Are In Charge Here” examines the central institution of the most populous Indigenous self-governance regime in Canada, the elected Assembly of the Nunatsiavut Government.

Nunatsiavut – “our beautiful land” in Inuktitut – was established in 2006 by a modern treaty between the Labrador Inuit and the Canadian state. Graham White offers a thorough observation of the Assembly, based on interviews with Assembly members and others involved in Nunatsiavut politics, observation of Assembly sessions, and a review of official documents, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the Assembly, its members, and its operations. The book examines the Assembly’s effectiveness in performing traditional legislative functions such as representation, policy making, and accountability. It addresses key concerns including executive-legislative power relations, Inuit influence on Assembly operations, and the Assembly’s role in realizing self-government.

Illuminating the intersection of Indigenous self-governance approaches and Western institutions, “We Are In Charge Here” will be of interest to political leaders, legislative officials, and academics concerned with the design and on-the-ground functioning of Indigenous self-government.

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Infrastructuring Urban Futures: The Politics of Remaking Cities

Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization.

Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.

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Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora

Knowledge-making in the field of alternative economies has limited the inclusion of Black and racialized people’s experience. In Beyond Racial Capitalism the goal is close that gap in development through a detailed analysis of cases in about a dozen countries where Black people live and turn to co-operatives to manage systemic exclusion. Most cases focus on how people use group methodology for social finance. However, financing is not the sole objective for many of the Black people who engage in collective business forms; it is about the collective and the making of a Black social economy.

Systemic racism and anti-Black exclusion create an environment where pooling resources, in kind and money, becomes a way to cope and to resist an oppressive system. This book examines co-operatives in the context of racial capitalism-a concept of political scientist Cedric J. Robinson’s that has meaning for the African diaspora who must navigate, often secretly and in groups, the landmines in business and society. Understanding business exclusion in the various cases enables appreciation of the civic contributions carried out by excluded racial minorities. These social innovations by Black people living outside of Africa who build co-operative economies go largely unnoticed. If they are noted, they are demoted to an “informal” activity and rationalized as having limited potential to bring about social change. The sheer determination of Black diaspora people to organize and build co-operatives that are explicitly anti-racist and rooted in mutual aid and the collective is an important lesson in making business ethical and inclusive.

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Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence

The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler-colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 rule to formally acknowledge a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization.

Contributors: René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile.

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