International Constitution-making as a Technique of Gender Ordering: Considering the Role of the Family in Global Economic Relations

Abstract

In “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” Anna Saunders highlights that the study and practice of constitutionalism exhibit a reluctance to consider the relationship between national constitutions and international economic relations. She argues that the prevailing epistemic boundaries of constitutionalism—understood as a self-contained project, separate from projects of global economic ordering—have largely insulated it from critiques raised by scholars concerned with the material and distributive implications of reshaping the global legal order through the making and revising of constitutions. This essay takes up Saunders's call to de-insulate constitution-making as a technique of international law from such critique by pointing to the family as an institution that is central both to constitutional ordering and to economic ordering, and thus can help overcome the epistemic boundary between the two. To this end, the essay brings together various strands of critical thought that identify one particular family structure—the nuclear family—as an exploitative institution that has (re)produced structural inequality both within and between states. Described as the “original sin” of modern constitutionalism and as an essential “instrument of colonization,” the nuclear family model represents an apt entry point to reconceiving constitution-making as Saunders suggests—in a way “that both acknowledges the discipline's past collaboration with forms of dispossession and exploitation, and that actively reconsiders its future boundaries.”