Concepts

The aim of Part I is twofold. First, it seeks to outline some of the issues surrounding the collective critical effort of this volume to interrogate and underline the importance of law and constitutionalism for the study of global political economy. Second and more specifically, it seeks to outline how new constitutionalism operates within the dynamics of emergent global market civilization as the ‘common sense’ for ordering the neo-liberal restructuring of local and global political economies and societies. There are four main themes to Part 1:

1. Conceptualization of the law as an active governing technique that is productive of political authority;

2. Expansion of the commodity form of law and new constitutionalism in the social reproduction of capitalist market civilization;

3. Globalization of the neo-liberal rule of law as a project to strengthen and legitimate the power of capital and to secure the absolute sovereignty of private property rights; and

4. Possibilities for the development of alternative or insurgent forms of constitutionalism to advance a more just, democratic and progressive world order.