The book seeks to critically examine the implication of a constitution of law for a political society. It presents a collection of essays that seek to investigate how power acts on power, how limits produce excess, how separation of powers produces the union of powers (sanctified by the very constitution that had guaranteed the division in the first place), and how the theory of separation is, at the same time, a myth and a reality. At the backdrop of the book, of course, is the theory that every good constitution rigorously separates the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary from one another to guarantee the independence of each of these powers, such that this separation results in life, liberty, and security. If a constitution, however, symbolises and produces power, precisely because it separates one site of power from another, it follows that it is power itself that is the limit of power. Constitutionalism as a political culture of laws, therefore, must explain the dynamics of power. The book addresses both constitutions and the societies in which they emerge. Many of the essays in this collection show how institutional practices originating from a legal text create a matrix of power that owes its life, neither to a contract between men, nor between the state and men, nor even between the society and men, but rather to relations established, organized, and formalized by laws. The collection is significant because it gives colonial and post-colonial experiences a justified place in studies of law and constitutionalism, for it shows that while Montesquieu, Kant, and Burke each in their own way were promoting the spirit of laws, a more significant history of law-making was being enacted in order to defend a particular rule, and a particular type of government on another side of the world. Based on comparative studies in several countries across three continents, the book centrally deals with issues of constitutionalism, politica

This book is a major reinterpretation of politics in Pakistan. Its focus is conflict among groups, communities, classes, ideologies and institutions, which has shaped the country's political dynamics. Mohammad Waseem critically examines the theory surrounding the millennium-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims as separate nations who practiced mingled faiths, and the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh renaissances that created a twentieth-century clash of communities and led to partition. Political Conflict in Pakistan addresses multiple clashes: between the high culture as a mission to transform society, and the low culture of the land and the people; between those committed to the establishment's institutional constitutional framework and those seeking to dismantle the "colonial" state; between the corrupt and those seeking to hold them to account; between the political class and the middle class; and between civil and military power. The author exposes how the ruling elite centralised power through the militarisation and judicialization of politics, rendering the federalist arrangement an empty shell and thus grossly alienating the provinces. He sets all this within the contexts of education and media as breeders of conflict, the difficulties of establishing an anti-terrorist regime, and the state's pragmatic attempts at conflict resolution by seeking to keep the outsiders inside. This is a wide-ranging account of a country of contestations.

This book examines constitutional law and practice in five South Asian countries: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

Routledge Readings on Law and Social Justice: Dispossessions, Marginalities, Rights presents some of the finest essays on social justice, rights and public policy. With a lucid new Introduction, it covers a vast range of issues and offers a compelling guide to understanding law and socio- legal studies in South Asia. The book covers critical themes such as the jurisprudence of rights, justice, dignity, with a focus on the regimes of patriarchy, labour and dispossession. The fourteen chapters in the volume, divided into three sections, examine contested sites of the constitution, courts, prisons, land and complex processes of migration, trafficking, digital technology regimes, geographical indications and their entanglements. This multidisciplinary volume foregrounds the politics and plural lives of/ in law by including perspectives from major authors who have contributed to the academic and/ or policy discourse of the subject. This book will be useful to students, scholars, policymakers and practitioners interested in a nuanced understanding of law, especially those studying law, marginality and violence. It will serve as essential reading for those in law, socio- legal studies, legal history, South Asian studies, human rights, jurisprudence and constitutional studies, gender studies, history, politics, conflict and peace studies, sociology and social anthropology. It will also appeal to legal historians and practitioners of law, and those in public administration, development studies, environmental studies, migration studies, cultural studies, labour studies and economics.

In the past two decades, China has endured, together with the rest of the world, two pandemics originating in Guangdong and Wuhan. While the severity and management of these pandemics varied, they both stemmed from the same root cause—the absence of constitutional enforcement and protection of fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and press. In the global village today, especially given China’s size and impact, the Chinese constitutional democracy is critical not only for China itself, but also for the whole world. Largely following China’s current (1982) Constitution, this book aims to produce a contemporary “landscape” of Chinese constitutional developments in essentially all major areas. Despite the lack of constitutional enforcement and serious backlashes in recent years, the author believes that the Constitution still matters, as China has achieved significant de facto progress in human rights and the rule of law since its Reform and Opening in 1978. Particularly, increasing number of citizens are becoming aware of their constitutional rights, which they are eager to defend in their interest. Ultimately, the future of China (and the world) depends on the efforts of the people themselves to promote its constitutional reforms and enforcement

A comparative and comprehensive account of the jurisprudence of constitutional conflict between the Court of Justice and national courts with the power of constitutional review. This monograph addresses the incidences of, and reasons for, constitutional clashes in the application and enforcement of EU law. It aims to determine how the principle of primacy of EU law works in reality and whether the jurisprudence of the courts under analysis supports this concept. To this end, the book explores the three areas of constitutional conflict: ultra vires review, identity review, and fundamental rights review. The book substantiates the descriptive and strengthens the normative contributions of the theory of constitutional pluralism in relation to the web of relations in the European judicial space. By examining the influence that the jurisprudence of constitutional conflict has on the balance of powers between the Court of Justice and constitutional courts, the volume develops the judicial triangle as an analytical tool that depicts the consequences for the horizontal (constitutional courts vis-à-vis the Court of Justice) and vertical judicial relationships (Court of Justice vis-à-vis ordinary national courts; constitutional courts vis-à-vis ordinary national courts). By offering a thorough compilation of the jurisprudence of constitutional conflict in the EU, The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict in the European Union improves our understanding of the principle of primacy of EU law and its limits, as well as reinforces the theory of constitutional pluralism in explaining and guiding judicial power relations and interactions in the EU.

Working from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on the social sciences, legal studies, and the humanities, this book investigates the causes and effects of the extremities experienced by migrants. Firstly, the volume analyses the development and political-cultural conditions of current practices and discourses of “bordering,” “illegality,” and “irregularization.” Secondly, it focuses on the varieties of irregularization and on the diversity of the fields, techniques and effects involved in this variegation. Thirdly, the book examines examples of resistance that migrants and migratory cultures have developed in order to deal with the predicaments they face. The book uses the European Union as its case study, exploring practices and discourses of bordering, border control, and migration regulation. But the significance of this field extends well beyond the European context as the monitoring of Europe’s borders increasingly takes place on a global scale and reflects an internationally increasing trend.

Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of globalization and literature, we in effect invoke the entire history of literature. Essays examine literary genres in relation to broader historical processes, connecting the present state of globalization to such key world-historic events as the early modern geographical and scientific explorations, the Enlightenment, the expansions of modernity in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postmodernity and postcoloniality, and contemporary counter-hegemonic movements. The book offers innovative readings of the pastoral from Saint-Pierre to Carpentier; the novel in Kant and Wieland, and in Diderot and Marx; travel writing from Verne to Cortázar; sports writing in James and Kahn; entrelacement in Bolaño, Ghosh, and Soderbergh; and also the Mozambican ghost story, Indian genre fiction, "fake" autobiographies, Sephardic "language memoirs," the postcolonial Gothic, Irish "chick lit," and counter-hegemonic novels. Making important theoretical contributions to a renewed discussion about genre, especially genres of narrative fiction, this volume addresses global studies, the history of the novel, and debates over periodization and nationalism in literary history.

This dynamic Handbook unpacks the entanglements between the two notions of home and migration, which illuminate the lived experiences of (in)voluntary mobilities and the contested terrain of inclusion and belonging. Drawing on cross-disciplinary contributions from leading international scholars, it advances research on the social study of home in relation to migration, refugee, displacement, and diaspora studies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

The first extended Lacanian reading of J. L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy, this book examines how it has been received in the continental tradition by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Oswald Ducrot. This is a tradition that neglects Austin's general speech act theory on behalf of his special theory of the performative, whilst bringing a new attention to the literary and the aesthetic. The book charts each of these theoretical interactions with a Lacanian reading of the thinker through a case study. Austin, Derrida and Butler are respectively read with a Hollywood blockbuster, a Shakespearean bestseller and a globally influential May '68 poster – texts preoccupied with the problem of subjectivity in early, high and postmodernity. Hence Austin's constatives (nonperformative statements) are explored with Dead Poets Society; Derridean naming with Romeo and Juliet; and Butlerian aesthetic re-enactment with We Are all German Jews. Finally, Rancière and Ducrot enable a return to Austin beyond his continental reception. Austin is valorised with a theory as attractive, and as irreducible, to the continental tradition as his own thought, namely Jacques Lacan's theory of the signifier. Drawing together some of the giants of language theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist thought, Habjan offers a new materialist reading of the 'ordinary' status of literary language and a vital contribution to current debates within literary studies and contemporary philosophy.