Decolonizing Constitutionalism: Beyond False or Impossible Promises

The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also Director Emeritus of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. He has written and published widely on the issues of sociology of law and the state, epistemology, intercultural democracy, social movements, postcolonialisms and global citizenship.

Sara Araújo is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) and invited assistant professor in sociology at the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Law, Justice and Citizenship in the 21st century and co-founded the PhD Programme in Sociology of the State, Law and Justice (CES and FEUC) that she now co-coordinates. She has researched and published on legal pluralism in Mozambique and East Timor, legal decolonization and social justice and cognitive justice in Europe.

Orlando Aragón Andrade is a professor and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (in Morelia) where he is the coordinator of the Laboratory of Legal Anthropology and of the State. His research focuses on the study of indigenous peoples' collective rights, legal pluralism, counter hegemonic uses of law, law's decolonization, epistemologies of the South and, relevantly, the construction of a militant legal anthropology. He is also a legal advisor and accompanies several autonomy and self-government processes in Mexico, as part of the Emancipations Collective, of which he is a founding member.