Beyond the People: Social Imaginary and Constituent Imagination

Speaker:

Zoran Oklopcic, Associate Professor, Carleton University (Canada)

Chair:

Dr Silvia Suteu (Lecturer in Public Law, UCL Laws)

About the event:

Increasingly preoccupied with the imaginative dimension of contemporary constitutionalism, its theorists are yet to offer an analytically sophisticated, conceptually illuminating, and practically useful account of constitutional imagination as an ongoing activity. Thus understood, constitutional imagination is another name for the practice of constitutional (and not just constitutional) theory. In systematically exploring how theorists' observations, figurations, representations, narrations, justifications, and aspirations affect their understanding of constitution-making, constitutional authorship, constituent power, democratic decision-making, sovereign will, institutional hierarchy, and legitimate authority, Beyond the People is a unique  attempt to describe how constitutional imagining might actually look in practice. In moving beyond the bounds of  traditional constitutional theory, it is also the first to offer a systematic, trans-disciplinary account of the figures, metaphors, scripts, standpoints, scenes, stages--which, together with a number of other more or less abstract schematizations--set the terms in which theorists debate the meaning, function, and significance of self-determination, constitutional democracy, and popular sovereignty. 

This talk will draw on Prof Oklopcic’s recent monograph, Beyond the People: Social Imaginary and Constituent Imagination (OUP 2018).

The event is free and open to all, but prior registration is encouraged. For further information, please email Dr Silvia Suteu at s.suteu@ucl.ac.uk.

About the speaker:

Zoran Oklopcic’s research focuses on the vocabulary of peoplehood in the context of state-formation at the intersection of three disciplines: constitutional theory, normative political theory, and international law. As part of that project, he has published on the metamorphosis of self-determination in the post-Cold War context; the concept of territorial rights in the context of theories of secession; and, the inadequacy of the concept of pouvoir constituant as means to justify the creation of new constitutional orders in the (semi-)periphery. He has been a MacCormick Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy, Visiting Researcher at the Department of Political Sciences University of Pompeu Fabra, Hauser Global Research Fellow at the NYU School of Law, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria Department of Political Science. At Carleton, he teaches critically-oriented introductory and advanced courses on modern constitutionalism and public international law.
 

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