Constitution

About: Constitution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 37828 publications have been published within this topic receiving 435603 citations.

When to Overthrow Your Government: The Right to Resist in the World's Constitutions

Abstract: On December 17 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor protesting an abusive police official set off a wave of democratic uprisings throughout the Arab world. In rising up against their governments, the peoples of the Arab Spring were confronting an age-old problem in political theory: when is it acceptable to rise up against an unjust authority? This question is not only of great importance to the peoples of the Middle East today, but was also of profound interest to the American founders and, through them, has informed the very basis of modern constitutionalism. It is perhaps unsurprising then that many constitutions themselves provide an answer to this question, allowing the people to challenge or overthrow their governments under certain circumstances. But to date, little systematic and empirical analysis has been done on the prevalence of this so-called “right to resist” in national constitutions, or on what motivates constitution-makers to adopt such a right. This article takes up the task. It presents a unique and original dataset on right to resist provisions in all national constitutions written since 1781, tracing its historical trajectory and demonstrating how it has proliferated in recent decades. The article moreover provides the first-ever empirical exploration of why it is, exactly, that constitution-makers give their people a constitutional mandate to overthrow or contradict their governing authorities – likely those very authorities elsewhere empowered by the same constitution. Drawing on a range of real-world examples as well as regression analysis, we show that right to resist provisions are most likely to be first established following a disruption of the previous constitutional order, either through popular democratic transition or through a violent political break such as coup d’etat. These findings suggest that the constitutional right to resist serves a dual function, depending on its context. On the one hand, the constitutional right to resist can represent a fundamentally democratic and forward-looking tool that constrains future government abuse, empowers national citizenry, and acts as an insurance policy against undemocratic backsliding. On the other hand, the right can serve as a backward-looking justification for coup-makers who seek retroactive legitimacy for whatever political crimes placed them in a position to be making a new constitution in the first place. Which of these two functions prevails may be in large part regionally determined. Latin American constitution-makers primarily adopted the right to resist in the aftermath of coup d’etats, while in other parts of the world the right to resist functions as a pre-commitment device against undemocratic backsliding. Our findings have significant implications for our broader understanding of constitutionalism. At the heart of any constitution, it is thought, lies a wish to bind the future on behalf of the present. Yet our findings suggest that, at least in some cases, constitutional provisions may also serve the function of reinterpreting and justifying the past. At least where the right to resist is concerned, constitutions are as much about yesterday as they are about tomorrow.

Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the "New World Order" to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order

Abstract: The constitution of (inter) national political order is undisputedly a creation of power. But how? And can raising the central question of power, once more, cast any new light on the condition of (inter) national politics now that the question of (inter) national order as such has been so forcefully re-posed in the aftermath of the ending of the Cold War and the dissolution of the postwar order?1 I think the answer to this second question is, "yes it can," and that that answer serves to clarify the first. If we look outside of the canon of international political theory, I also think we can find an understanding of power that will afford some new interpretive purchase upon contemporary (inter) national politics. This understanding is made available in Continental European philosophy, specifically in the work of Michel Foucault.

Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution

Abstract: The supporters of the United States Constitution touted it as, among many other things, the only solution to a terrible economic slump. Nearly all free Americans believed much of the responsibility for the recession of the 1780s lay with the thirteen state legislatures. Yet not everyone was of the same mind about what the assemblies, which controlled debtor-creditor relations, the money supply, and the collection of \"Continental\" as well as state taxes under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), had done wrong. The Federalists believed the lower houses of the legislatures—which in most states were annually elected and essentially omnipotent—bad damaged tbe economy by caving in to taxpayers' and debtors' demands for release from their legal obligations. They claimed relief legislation was unjust both to government bondholders {the primary recipients of tax money) and to private creditors—and that it had provoked them to stop supplying the capital and credit that were the lifeblood of the American economy. For them, one of the most attractive features of the proposed Constitution was its abolition of relief. The best-known opponents of the Constitution concurred in the Federalists' judgment tbat the state assemblies had caused, or at least exacerbated, the recession of the 1780s by yielding to grass-roots pressure for tax and debr relief. So have most historians of the Constitution. They say the federal convention tbat mer in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 paved the way for economic revival by creating a new government that was more responsible than its state-level counterparts because it was less responsive to tbe public will.'