Research within the Global Constitution Project
The Global Constitution Project is led and coordinated by Prof. Joyeeta Gupta, and co-led by three PhD researchers whose work focuses on different dimensions of Global Constitutionalism. It is structured around four key pillars: legal, financial, technological, and environmental global governance. Below are the abstracts for the 8-month papers of each of the PhD Candidates, where you can learn more about their research trajectories.
Law within a global constitution - Georgios Dikaios
In the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin 2015), international law faces a deep crisis, with the future of multilateralism highly contested. At the same time, Earth system multicrises have generated calls for a global constitution to govern the shared ecospace (Gupta 2018). Against this backdrop, several transnational norms increasingly perform functions traditionally associated with constitutions. They allocate governance authority, constrain ordinary international law through hierarchically superior norms or protected spheres of legal autonomy, and fill governance gaps between domestic and international law (Dunoff and Trachtman 2009), functioning as a yardstick for authority beyond the state (De Wet 2006). However, these constitutional-esque functions do not bear the checks and balances characteristic of domestic constitutionalism (Peters 2006). Moreover, they are not inherently positive or neutral, but can also operate as structural conditions of injustice.
While the existence of norms with global constitutional-esque functions has been discussed (Petersmann 2002; Cass 2005), an evaluation of their effects has been largely unassessed. This is particularly pronounced at the public-private intersection, where state and non-state actors, as well as private and public law, interact within frameworks shaped by competing teleological standpoints. Although research has examined the effects of such norms (Sornarajah 2015; Mayer and Simlinger 2019; Hegde and Wouters 2021; McNamara et al. 2021), these effects have not been sufficiently connected with the global constitutional-esque character of the norms from which they originate. These two gaps give rise to a third: the lack of focus on developing more just global constitutional-esque arrangements at the private-public intersection, which is the ultimate objective of this research.
This research draws on critical global constitutionalist scholarship (e.g. Schwöbel 2010; O’Donoghue and Houghton 2019; Kochi 2020; Boysen 2023), Earth System Justice (Gupta et al. 2023), and theories emphasizing the relational and spatial character of global constitutional-esque power between the Global North and the Global South. It combines legal doctrinal analysis with non-legal empirical methods to map global norms with constitutional-esque functions in fields such as international trade and investment law and climate-induced loss and damage reparations, analyze the relational and spatial effects they produce, and identify legal mechanisms for their reinterpretation.
Finance within a global constitution - Aljoscha Karg
International financial subordination describes and theorizes the persistent and structural asymmetries developing and emerging economies face in the global financial and monetary architecture. At the same time, critical legal scholars have been emphasizing the fundamental, if not foundational, role of the law in institutionalizing spatially uneven economic relations and imperial exploitation. However, while a number of studies implicitly touch upon these scalar-legal dimensions, most of the literature on financial subordination has not yet engaged with the role of (trans)national legal frameworks. Against this background, this dissertation asks: How do (trans)national legal frameworks shape international financial subordination? To address this question, I examine the legal frameworks underpinning international financial and monetary relations in three key domains – low-income country sovereign debt, international financial standard setting to combat money laundering and terrorism financing and currency hierarchies – in relation to the inequalities they generate based on three recent case studies: Ethiopia’s debt restructuring process, Vanuatu’s persistent financial blacklisting and Pakistan’s exchange rate crisis. Drawing on expert interviews and doctrinal and document analysis, this research demonstrates how existing (trans)national legal frameworks – introduced and dominated by Northern actors – operate and (re)produce adverse socio-economic and environmental effects across distinct Southern geographies despite differences in income levels, vulnerabilities and specific national contexts. Finally, insights learned provides a fruitful starting point for a discussion of alternative, more just (trans)national legal principles for governing international financial and monetary relations as part of a global constitution.