Constitutionalism and Governance

From 18^th to 21^st October 2024, Professor Aoife O’Donoghue (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr Ruth Houghton (Newcastle Law School) were teaching a course on “Feminist Constitutionalism: Law, Gender and Constitutions” at Masaryk University (MUNI) Law School. MUNI Law is based in Brno in Czechia.

The module was divided into five seminars: (1) Gender, Feminism and Law (2) Intersectionality, Poststructuralism, and Posthumanism, (3) Feminist Constitutionalism: Constitutional Change, (4) Speculative Feminist Constitutions (Manifestos, Utopias), and (5) Drafting a Feminist Constitution. After introducing students to a variety of feminist perspectives, the course takes a deep-dive into approaches of feminist constitutionalism. Drawing on Houghton and O’Donoghue’s work on feminist approaches to constituent power, the course interrogates processes of constitutional change through feminist lenses. Houghton and O’Donoghue highlight the role of feminist manifestos in claims of constituent power made by feminist movements and women’s activists across different historical periods and around the world. Working with this approach to manifestos within constitutionalism, the course works towards two creative tasks: writing feminist manifestos and then drawing on feminist perspectives to (re)write constitutional provisions.

As part of the Speculative Feminist Constitutions seminar, students worked in teams and individually to write their own manifestos. This teaching technique draws on workshops on feminist constitutional-drafting that are run by the FemCon team, as well as drawing inspiration from Joy Twemlow’s use of Zine-making as a teaching method and the DIYing Gender zine-making guide. The different feminist manifestos that students wrote were then compiled into a Zine:

Ruth and Aoife would like to thank all the students who participated in the course for their enthusiasm and their openness to sharing ideas, stories and examples. They would also like to sincerely thank Markéta Štěpáníková for the invitation to come to MUNI and Věra Redrupová for sorting out all the logistics including buying paper and glue as well as getting the scissors to aid in making the Zines.

Principles of doing feminist constitutionalism include (un)learning and continually working to learn from each other. And indeed, throughout the course there was a mutual sharing of knowledge and understanding about different constitutional and legal cultures.

In October 2024, Dr Ruth Houghton visited UNESP College of Humanities and Social Sciences in Franca in Brazil to lead a set of seminars on the module, ‘Globalization, Inequality and Democracy’. Across the course of the week, Masters and PhD researchers discussed the contemporary challenges for global constitutionalism, and questions of democracy and constituent power were at the forefront of the investigations. One of the contemporary challenges that the seminars focused on was gender inequality and in particular, the seminars looked at feminist approaches to constitutionalism and global constitutionalism.

In Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women’s Citizenship, Ruth Rubio-Marín calls on constitutional scholars to uncover the “her”stories of constitutionalism. What are the forgotten stories where women and marginalised groups have called for legal and political change? Even where these calls were left unanswered or political activism failed, these stories should be part of the constitutional fabric. We can ask why these campaigns were ignored and why have these stories gone unheard. Drawing on this inspiration, and working with Joy Twemlow’s use of Zine-making as a teaching method, and the DIYing Gender zine-making guide, the group in Franca worked in teams to craft a “Counter Narrative of Global Constitutionalism”. This blog post tries to capture some of that work.

The ripped front cover, exposing the word “our” works to emphasise the incompleteness of the project of creating a global constitutionalism or indeed of problematising the idea of crafting a singular counter-narrative. The work is ongoing. The inside page draws attention to themes that oscillated in the classes during the week of working together: why do we need a global constitution or global constitutionalism? What are the challenges that the world faces and how could a global constitutional response mitigate these? What should be in a global constitution?

The first Zine page drafts an “Our Constitution”. Sketched on ephemeral post-it notes that are by design removable, the constitution poses questions rather than provisions. For example: “Who were we?” “What do we want to be?” There are several blank post-it notes symbolising the ongoing and iterative process of constitution-making, left intentionally empty so that future generations can fill in their wants, dreams and desires. This constitution offers an open invitation to others to participate in the drafting process; “This is a work in progress: could you help us?”.

Related to the “Our Constitution” is the theory written in the ‘Manifesto to Cosmopolitan Federative Agora’. Here the group drew on Ruth Levitas’ theory of utopia as method to consider the archaeological, architectural and ontological role of utopian-thinking. Applying this method, how could we think of global constitutionalism otherwise. Treating global constitutionalism as it is currently understood as a utopian project (just a utopia that is not our own), the manifesto uses the archaeological tool to expose the groups, rights and structures of the global constitutional utopian-project: how it priorities and benefits white western male-centric notions of the individual, and powerful players within international law. In an attempt to build an alternative way of thinking, the architectural is used to construct a cosmopolitan community.

The ‘Manifesto Based on a Black Mother Who is Head of a Household’ centres the experiences of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Born in 1914, de Jesus was a memoirist who published her diaries, Quarto de Despejo. Against a backdrop of experiences such as violence, solitude, prejudice and low income, we see “Courage”. As Houghton and O’Donoghue argue, reading feminist manifestos as constituent power allows us to consider how constituent power can be exercised differently, not just as revolutions and revolts. The reminder of “courage” that sits across this manifesto invokes the idea of resilience and resistance as an alternative way of doing constituent power. The Manifesto calls us to reflect on how global constitutionalism would be done differently if the experiences of Black women in Brazil were central and not marginalised.

One of the manifestos included is “The Student way to understand make sense of the world”. Written in Portuguese, this manifesto is evocative of the many conversations that the group had about translations and language and working across multiple languages in doing comparative constitutional work. “Understand” is crossed out and replaced with “make sense of the world”, indicative of the iterative process of manifesto and constitution-making, a work in progress, acknowledging explicitly the changes to a text, the choices and decisions that have been made.

In Brazil, football is constitutional. Constitutional in the sense that it is a fundamental part of the culture and (as one student explained) a key part of Brazilian transnational cultural exchange. Across the week, the group shared stories of the two key teams in the State of São Paulo:  The Corinthians and the Palmeiras. It is not surprising then that football was included in the counter-narrative. One of the zine pages is dedicated to the story of The Corinthians Democracy. In the 1980s, the football team engaged in processes of internal democratisation (within the team management) and articulations of what we might call constituent power. In particular, the team started a movement to stand against the authoritarian dictatorship in Brazil. Organizing protests before games, for example. This story acts as a reminder to consider where articulations of constituent power might be found: outside of the formal constitutional assemblies, can we see evidence of constituent power even on the football grounds? 

Continuing the football theme, one of the zine pages focuses on the experience of women’s football in Brazil. Using newspaper cuttings, this zine page documents the exclusion (indeed prohibition) of women from football, through to the rise of women’s football in the country, and the continued discrimination and sexual harassment that women football players experience. Stories of women playing football despite the ban invokes that idea of resilience and resistance that informs the feminist conceptualisations of constituent power, whilst the examples of sexual harassment are a pertinent reminder of the work that still needs to be done.  

The final zine-page is a manifesto drawing on women’s movements and women’s activists in Brazil. The “We Fight For” manifesto provides the “her”stories of women participating in constitution-making, legal and political change. The first example highlights the “her”story of the “Lipstick Lobby”, a women’s movement in the 1980s to champion the election of women onto the constituent assembly. The manifesto also includes references to Lélia Gonzalez (politician and women’s rights defender) and the Brazilian activist Maria da Penha, who’s work and activism led to the introduction of Law 11.340/2006 on protection against domestic and family violence. Alongside this focus on women participating in constitution-making, the manifesto places a number of calls for substantive rights.

The final page of the Zine draws together some of the overarching themes that resonated across the week. As noted above, questions of language and translation were central to the work of the group. In undertaking an analysis of the constitutional text, to consider if and how positions of responsibility within government are gendered, this depends on how the nouns might be gendered in Portuguese. Critiques of the lack of diversity and impossibility of consensus in global constitutionalism were prominent across the week. What does global constitutionalism look like from a classroom in Franca, in Brazil, in October 2024? How could it be constructed differently if Brazil, and not a “Global North” perspective, were made central?

The act of zine-making as a tool to uncover these counter-narratives of constitutionalism allowed for a diversity of perspectives. The creativity of the zine meant that the group were not trammelled by previous conceptions and assumptions of what is and what is not constitutional, thus opening up new possibilities for ways of doing constituent power and informal unexplored sites of constitution-making. The making of this “manifesto”, or this counter-narrative, was a collective and collaborative endeavour. It emerged from relation-building that had taken place over the course of the week, the shared space and the shared experiences. The zine is then also an archive of the friendships forged and of the knowledge shared and exchanged. 

The Rights of Nature: Global Perspectives – Emily Jones and Majan Irannezhadparizi in Conversation

Monday 17th of June, 11 – 12.30, UTS Law Boardroom

Please join us for this event, hosted by the UTS International Law Research Cluster and the UTS Feminist Law Research Group. After the talk, we invite you to join the speakers for a (self-funded) lunch at a nearby venue. If you wish to come to lunch, please RSVP to jessie.hohmann@uts.edu.au by 1 June.

The rights of nature discourse has developed an evolving movement, with states globally, on all continents, recognising nature as a right holder in the aim of addressing climate change, environmental degradation and the anthropocentric underpinnings of environmental law. While more and more states are adopting rights of nature in their legal systems, their approaches vary, both in terms of the exact models adopted as well as in terms of enforceability and effectiveness.

In this event, Fatemeh Irannezhadparizi (UTS) and Emily Jones (Newcastle Law School, UK) will discuss the potentials and pitfalls of the rights of nature movement. Topics will include the various rights of nature models being adopted by different states, their effectiveness, and the potentials and limitations of bringing the rights of nature to international law, situating such rights within the context of the legacy of international human rights law and drawing on feminist, Marxist and postcolonial analyses accordingly.

Speaker Biographies

Dr Emily Jones is a NUAcT Fellow based in Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University, UK. Emily’s research broadly examines modes of resistance and hope in relation to the theory and practice of public international law, drawing on feminist, queer, posthuman, postcolonial and critical disability studies in that aim. Her work spans several fields of international law, including international environmental law; international human rights law; science, technology and international law; international disarmament law; gender and conflict; the law of the sea; and outer space law, among others. Emily’s monograph, Feminist Theory and International Law: Posthuman Perspectives, was published with Routledge’s GlassHouse series in 2023. Emily is the co-author of The Law of War and Peace: A Gender Analysis, Volume One, (Bloomsbury, 2021) and has co-edited two volumes: the More Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury, 2022) and International Law & Posthuman Theory (Routledge, 2024).

Fatemeh (Majan) Irannezhadparizi landed in Australia to join University of Technology Sydney (UTS) academic community as a Visiting Scholar. This opportunity also opened a new door for her to contribute as a tutor teaching public international law at UTS. With a profound passion for both conserving nature and for international law, her academic journey led her to an interdisciplinarity landscape. In international legal debates, she is interested in looking into a variety of fields including environmental conservation, cultural heritage, rights of nature, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, sustainable development, and human rights. Her in-depth passion and knowledge about international environmental law and her expertise in English-Persian legal translation have exposed her to many collaborative opportunities to enrich Persian legal literature on progressive developments in international law related to environmental conservation. Her master’s degree in environmental law culminated in a Persian book Sustainable Development and Indigenous-Local Heritage in International Law (Mizan Legal Foundation, 2016) with a valuable preface by Prof. Janet Blake. She reviewed the volume Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (International Law Agendas, 2023). Recently, she completed her doctoral mission, during which she explored the opportunities and challenges inherent in cultivating the growing seed of rights of nature in the current realm of international law.

Sean Molloy, ‘The Committee on the Rights of the Child and Article 12: Applying the Lundy model to treaty body recommendations’ (2024) Leiden Journal of International Law. doi:10.1017/S0922156524000098

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/leiden-journal-of-international-law/article/committee-on-the-rights-of-the-child-and-article-12-applying-the-lundy-model-to-treaty-body-recommendations/C78FB997D259CFFC4D19786B406CCC0F