Bill 21 is a highly contested law adopted in Quebec that bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their duties. Rather than analyse Bill 21 on its merits, the article treats it as a test case for global legal pluralism, examining how the validity of the law from an international perspective depends on the frames one uses to analyse it. It finds that a basic tension permeates the entire debate between a universalist vision of rights and a vision of rights as anchored in particular political configurations that demand a constant process of adaptation. That tension is visible in the dualist opposition between Canadian and international law; in the role of federalism as a significant mediating factor in the implementation of constitutional and international rights; and in the kind of majoritarian check on rights that manifests itself in the Canadian Charter of Rights’ ‘notwithstanding clause’. Throughout, the article explores how these tensions might be mediated in ways that do not simply oppose international and domestic law but seek to make the most of their interaction.

Conservative NGOs contesting women’s rights in the United Nations are on the rise, and their activity is increasingly described as an antifeminist backlash. This article focuses a new theoretical lens on this development: socialization. It argues that conservative NGOs’ socialization into transnational practices and the United Nations has played a significant part in facilitating the antifeminist backlash. To support this claim, the article examines socialization comprehensively, applying several analytical angles: its definition, directionality, mechanism, degree and effects. It also treats conservative NGOs’ socialization as both a process and an outcome. As a process, it unfolds horizontally, by conservative NGOs competitively mimicking feminist NGOs in two domains in particular: their manner of transnational organizing and their skilful use of the UN human rights framework. The article finds that conservative NGOs have socialized into transnational NGO practices and the regulative institutional rules of the United Nations, but not into all its constitutive norms. The chief effect of this kind of socialization is polarization. The article singles out and empirically illustrates three of its manifestations: the struggle for institutional spaces; zero-sum politics based on a sense of existential threat; and the use of a strong moralizing discourse.

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women’s international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’ equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this ‘norm spoiling’ strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ ‘global gag rule’; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’ speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.

There is a need for the field of global constitutionalism to consider a wider array of voices, such as women’s voices and perspectives from the Global South. Here, I argue that global constitutionalism must pay attention not only to a wider array of human perspectives, but also to non-human perspectives and to different understandings of what the law is and can be. Evaluating how international law categorizes the environment and non-human animals as things or objects to be exploited for human needs, I argue that posthuman feminism provides an alternative epistemic frame for rethinking both global constitutionalism and international law.

Presidential term limit provisions are often perceived as a feature of modern democratic systems. It has been argued that their existence is a key intervention mechanism to pre-empt some undemocratic outcomes associated with incumbency advantages. In 2008, the Constitution of Cameroon was amended to abolish the presidential term limit. More than ten years on, there are ostensible signs of a democratic decline. This article takes a retrospective look at the constitutional amendment to assess its constitutionality. It is argued that a conclusion on the constitutionality of the amendment may not be unequivocal. Nevertheless, there are substantial grounds for considering the constitutional change as a constitutional dismemberment. This is premised on the fact that, although the amendment followed the normal rules for constitutional amendments, the transformation amounted to a fundamental break with the constitutional commitment to democracy that underpinned the adoption of the 1996 Constitution.

This article examines the United Kingdom’s use of drones in an act of self-defence in a counter-terrorism operation. The government justified the targeted killing of a UK citizen in Syria – a country with which it was not at war at the time – with reference to existing laws and norms. In doing so, it contested a number of established concepts to justify its conduct as lawful activity. The article argues that modern weapons such as drones, which are used to address novel threats, lead to legal justification that in turn has the potential to create new laws. In this way, the intersection of norms, warfare and new technologies becomes a productive site of political contestation. The contribution of the article is twofold: empirically, it contributes to debates on targeted killing and discussions surrounding the meaning and interpretation of ‘imminence’ in the context of preventive self-defence in the United Kingdom; and theoretically, it adds to the constructivist literature by examining norm contestation and resulting normativity in this area. The article concludes that the legal justification in this particular instance has important implications for other emerging technologies that require discussions about how states justify their actions to conform with existing legal and normative frameworks.

This article examines the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines’ provisions on social and economic rights and welfare. It considers how the 1987 Constitution fits within the post-liberal paradigm of ‘transformative’ constitutional texts that emerged during democratic transitions in the 1980s and 1990s. It then analyses how the Supreme Court of the Philippines responded to the constitutional call for egalitarian socio-economic reform in the first fifteen years after the People Power revolution. The article highlights how the 1987 Constitution envisions far-reaching, progressive socio-economic change, and incorporates both social and economic rights as well as open-ended policy goals in this regard. The article argues that this hybrid approach to distributive justice creates a distinctive set of interpretive challenges for the judiciary. It then argues that the Philippine Supreme Court’s approach to these provisions in the years following the transition to democracy was perfunctory and somewhat inchoate. The court affirmed its jurisdiction over these provisions, but did not develop meaningful standards or principles in relation to them. The article points out that transformative constitutional texts place difficult demands on the judiciary in relation to social and economic rights. They prompt the judiciary into unfamiliar domains. At the same time, institutional legitimacy – including legitimacy on questions of distributive justice – requires judges to sustain the sense of a cogent boundary between constitutional law and politics. The article argues that these challenges were heightened in the Philippines by the textual ambiguity of the 1987 Constitution as well as the relative dearth of jurisprudential resources at the time. It concludes by considering the implications of the Philippines experience for the design of transformative constitutions.

This article argues that this special section reveals a practical global constitutionalism, or one that integrates a liberal constitutional set of ideas with the histories and practices of Asian states.

The contestation of global governance institutions can strengthen or weaken, as well as transform, them. This article analyses the productive potential of contestation and justification of global governance institutions by examining the multiple authorities that are invoked as auxiliaries in the process. It studies the (re-)construction of these authorities by dissecting authority into three components: power, legitimacy and connection to public interests. Empirically, the article focuses on the issue area of business and human rights, examining the highly contested process of drafting a binding instrument in the United Nations Treaty Process. The analysis shows that the success of the Treaty Process not only hinges on its direct reaction to contestation, but also on its ability to (re-)construct the multiple related authorities. Ultimately, the article argues that the contestation of global governance institutions involves (re-)constructing multiple authorities. This demonstrates how contestation can also affect global governance institutions, actors and norms beyond the specific field of deliberation.

The comment expands the logic of the critique of the ‘judicialisation’ in the global era and suggests that arguments in support of this development often engage in confirmatory research which weighs the ‘evidence’ in light of our wishes and political projects. The talk about ‘learning’ and ‘dialogue’ cannot sustain this form of judicial paternalism (at best) as an instantiation of emancipation or celebrate it as a victory for law by dispensing with politics. It is just a politics by other means. But in this politics some traditional remedies for insuring the accountability of the ‘rulers’ (or rule-handlers) have been weakened. The comment adds several critical observations about the practices of discourse, law, politics and judging which cannot camouflage the problem of power and its legitimisation. Thus we had better consider also a political alternative which relies on a variety of different institutional solutions where courts have to compete with other institutions without fixed hierarchies and where different sources of legitimacy stand in tension with each other.

Critics challenge international courts for their interference with domestic democratic processes and alleged violations of rule of law standards: they claim that these guardians of the rule of law are not well guarded themselves. These concerns should not be dismissed too quickly as mere disgruntled venting by populist politicians. This article focuses on regional human rights courts and argues that the same interests and values that justify rule of law standards of impartiality, independence and accountability domestically also justify similar standards for international courts. Focusing on the European Court of Human Rights and its doctrine of the margin of appreciation, the article demonstrates how this doctrine may contribute to fulfilling the rule of law but at the same time may also endanger it. This requires changes to the doctrine to ensure that the core rule of law standards of predictability and protection against arbitrary discretion are respected.

Beyond setting the stage, the Introduction makes three claims about the conceptual triangle of the rule of law, judicial authority and legitimacy. The first is that all three are essentially contested and interpretive concepts in the sense of Walter B. Gallie and Ronald Dworkin. In their expositions, the contested and interpretative nature of such concepts is nothing to be ‘solved’, rather the formulation of different conceptions and contestation about them are central functions of such concepts. The interpretive and essentially contested nature points us to the relevant ‘actors’ and to conflicts and trade-offs between contested competencies. Thus the second point is that arguments about the rule of law and judicial legitimacy are often a means of questioning or securing the authority of a particular actor or institution in relation to other actors and institutions. The final point is that transposing concepts from the domestic to the supranational is a constructive endeavour because it entails creating new conceptions and substituting old ones as well as legitimising new authorities and delegitimising old ones. Thus, this special issue also cautions against discourses that ultimately are more about legitimation than about legitimacy and more about new ways of ruling than the rule of law.

This article sheds a critical light on judicial dialogue when its purpose and meaning are taken beyond cross-fertilization and comparative reasoning. It cautions against a conceptualization of judicial dialogue as a means to foster commonalities between courts and to legitimize judicial governance. The argument develops from an idealized notion of a ‘transnational judicial public sphere’. In this sphere, domestic, regional and international courts ideally form common opinions through dialogue and pursue common purposes. The danger of this understanding is to construct a new paradigm that not only overlooks important differences in the interest, influence and opinion of courts, but also overstates the socio-normative significance of exchanges between courts and of judicial governance in general. The critical potential of judicial dialogues lies less in the formation of commonalities or in the legitimization of judicial authority than in bringing alternatives and a plurality of opinions to the fore.

In A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice and the European Convention on Human Rights, Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan argue that there has been the emergence of, and increasing prospects for, a cosmopolitan legal order based on the Convention. This symposium aims to engage with, and to better explore, the theoretical implications and practical legal ramifications of their argument. In doing so, this first article acts as a general introduction to the symposium, laying out the major arguments of the book as well as arguments presented by the symposium contributors. Moving beyond the summative, this introduction also situates A Cosmopolitan Legal Oder within broader debates in global constitutionalism, while defending its use of Kant’s cosmopolitan theory. Lastly, it explores some of the key implications and challenges that arise from the symposium itself, rooting these insights within the current context of anti-globalism, nationalism, populism and neo-sovereigntism, and the corresponding necessity for a more transitional and pluralistic response as offered in A Cosmopolitan Legal Order.

This article examines the path of global constitutionalism and its encounter with cultural diversity in Africa. It situates the phenomenon of global constitutionalism in the late nineteenth century and traces some of its tectonic transformations since the inauguration of the liberal international order. Besides referring to the processes of and calls for the constitutionalization of the international legal regime and the emergence of global constitutional law, global constitutionalism played a constitutive role for constitutionalism in Africa. As constitutionalism in Africa is configured within a biosphere of global constitutionalism and cultural diversity, their dynamic interplay leads to the emergence of jurisgenerative constitutionalism, which is procedurally and normatively open to accommodate a plural conception of rights, justice and values. As a result, what is constitutionally permissible and what is not cannot simply be determined by an attachment to either global constitutionalism or cultural diversity. Rather, it is the interaction of global constitutionalism and cultural diversity in time and place that dictates what the constitutional practice or outcome should look like. By taking the women’s rights jurisprudence related to customary and Islamic laws and the phenomenon of Shariacracy as themes of analysis, and Nigeria as a case study, this article explores how the emergence of jurisgenerative constitutionalism mediates global constitutionalism and cultural diversity in Africa. By bringing in the African experience, the article sheds some light on the range of theoretical and practical possibilities available to the emerging field of global constitutionalism.

Constitutions are social and historical artefacts that take part in the government of humans. Based on a comparison of how contemporary ‘global’ and historical ‘local’ constitutional documents establish power relations between ‘humans’ and their ‘government’, this article suggests that both types of documents involve different constitutive logics. Global constitutional documents create a ‘new normativity’ – a reversed constitution – that turns the historical relationship between pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué on its head. Such documents shift the primary responsibility for human rights from governments to humans. Research in the academic field of global constitutionalism omits this constitutional reconfiguration. By offering a more historically sensitive and reflexive account of constitutionalization, the field of global constitutionalism can realize an as yet unexplored critical potential.

‘Accountability’ is the international legal term du jour. The concept is omnipresent in contemporary discussions about the UN Security Council in particular. From the lack of due process guarantees for individuals implicated in its counter-terrorism sanctions regime, to the (in)compatibility of Council authorized uses of force with international human rights and humanitarian law, no aspect of the Council’s recent practice has been immune from an accountability critique. Driven by the context in which it has emerged, the turn to accountability is seemingly prompted by a felt desire among international lawyers to constrain the arbitrary use of the Council’s considerable powers. However, beyond this felt desire, the concept lacks a robust theoretical foregrounding, both on its own terms and in relation to existential developments in international law. In an attempt to remedy this, this article situates the turn to accountability as a product of the broader turn to ‘constitutionalist’ thinking in international law. Specifically, it suggests that mainstream approaches resonate with a particular ‘liberal-legalist style’ of global constitutionalism. From both an etymological and epistemological perspective, however, I argue that this prevailing style offers an incomplete sense of accountability. The article introduces the dichotomy of ‘liberal-legal’ and more overtly ‘political’ styles of global constitutionalism as a heuristic device in order to offer a broader conception of accountability in the Security Council context. Political constitutionalism, I believe, offers important insights that will allow us to perceive and critique the Security Council in new ways.

Owing to the vagaries of the ‘constitutionalization’ of the European Union, legal scholarship has disregarded the momentous constitutional transformation brought about by the European Convention System. This is regrettable, not least because the Convention has reconfigured national constitutional authority in a cosmopolitan context. The emerging cosmopolitan constitutionalism is based upon three ideas: first, the exercise of state authority must also be legitimate from the perspective of those who are not citizens; second, a constitution must embrace fundamental rights and the representation of insiders in order to facilitate the representation of all, including outsiders; third, the authority of the constitution doesn’t just depend on endorsement by an independent people but also on recognition by other peoples who pursue the same type of political project. At the same time, any cosmopolitan constitutional system needs to leave space for particularity. It is therefore not accidental that the idea of a ‘margin of appreciation’ is of pivotal significance.

When actors express conflicting views about the validity or scope of norms or rules in relation to other norms or rules in the international sphere, they often do so in the language of international law. This contribution argues that international law’s hermeneutic acts as a common language that cuts across spheres of authority and can thus serve as a conflict management tool for interface conflicts. Often, this entails resorting to an international court. While acknowledging that courts cannot provide permanent solutions to the underlying political conflict, I submit that court proceedings are interesting objects of study that promote our understanding of how international legal argument operates as a conflict management device. I distinguish three dimensions of common legal form, using the well-known EC–Hormones case as illustration: a procedural, argumentative, and substantive dimension. While previous scholarship has often focused exclusively on the substantive dimension, I argue that the other two dimensions are equally important. In concluding, I reflect on a possible explanation as to why actors are disposed to resort to international legal argument even if this is unlikely to result in a final solution: there is a specific authority claim attached to international law qua law.

Fragmentation, institutional overlaps, and norm collisions are often seen as fundamental problems for the global (legal) order. Supposedly, they incite conflict and disorder. However, some scholars have also emphasised functional and normative advantages of the resulting institutional pluralism. We argue that the consequences of the increasing international institutional density are conditional on whether and how different norms, institutions, and authorities are coordinated. In distinction from the fragmentation framework in international law and the regime complexity framework in international relations, this introduction outlines an interface conflict framework that enables important insights into this question and guides the contributions assembled in this issue. It zooms in on the micro-level of conflict between actors that justify incompatible positional differences with reference to different international norms. In particular, the concept of interface conflicts allows studying the conditions under which overlaps and norm collisions become activated in conflicts as well as the ways in which such conflicts are handled. Foreshadowing the main findings of the contributions to this Special Issue, we hold that interface conflicts are neither inevitable nor unmanageable. Most importantly, it seems that, more often than not, conflicts stimulate cooperative forms of management and contribute to the building of inter-institutional order.