Abstract

Critics of constitutional globalisation have focused on the spreading judicialisation of politics, or the entrenchment of neoliberal modes of supranational governance. Such perspectives tend to prioritise globalisation from above; introducing Southern-based grassroots resistance – globalisation from below – delineates the shared epistemological underpinnings of Western liberal and critical constitutional theory, and opens debate on prevailing understandings of constitutionalism and critique. This recovers an understanding of constitutionalism as always comprised of constitutionalism from above and below. This highlights an emerging critical methodology which interrogates Modernist ontologies of the bounded self in shaping constitutional world-views, and posits instead a paradigm of relational constitutionalism.