Constitutional dictatorships, from colonialism to COVID-19

Meierhenrich, Jens ORCID: 0000-0002-2165-3268 (2021) Constitutional dictatorships, from colonialism to COVID-19. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 17. 411 - 439. ISSN 1550-3585

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Abstract

In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. It is capable of illuminating-and retelling-epic histories of constitutional law, of alerting us to commonalities in constitutional practices of domination-and thus of violence-that would otherwise remain shrouded in legal orientalism. The analysis aspires to make constitutional law strange again. To this end, I trace nomoi and narratives of constitutional dictatorship from colonialism to the coronavirus pandemic. Arguing against emergency scripts, I relate the idea of "emergency" to the everyday and both to coloniality. Mine is a rudimentary conceptual history-a Begriffsgeschichte-of constitutional dictatorship. I think of the empirical vignettes about crisis government in the colony/postcolony on which my comparative historical analysis is based as prolegomena to a critical theory of constitutional dictatorship.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.annualreviews.org/journal/lawsocsci
Additional Information:	© 2021 Annual Reviews Inc.
Divisions:	International Relations Centre for International Studies
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General) K Law > K Law (General)
Date Deposited:	14 Mar 2022 14:27
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2024 17:24
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114347

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