Southern turn, Northern implications: rethinking the meaning of colonial legacies for Comparative Constitutional Studies

Abstract

Comparative constitutional studies has not digested globalization and the emergence of a multipolar world. To do so, I argue here, would require a far more serious engagement with Southern experiences of constitutionalism, including colonial legacies and a past that lingers on in legal doctrine, conceptual vocabulary, methodology and institutional structures. Such a Southern turn is not only about the South but equally about the North and the entanglement of North and South. In fact, colonial legacies are equally relevant but much less understood in the North. The Southern turn is hence a double turn: to the South and then to the North and the world. This article sketches how to rethink methodologies and approaches to comparative constitutional scholarship and discusses the notion of the Global South in that context. In doing so, it demonstrates how a Southern turn would both provide new insights into constitutionalism in the South as much as in the North and open up new avenues to rethink constitutional theory. Such rethinking enters tricky terrain as colonial legacies play out differently in different places and epistemic communities. This article is a call for a common conversation nonetheless. It is an intellectual provocation and invitation to develop an approach to comparative constitutional scholarship and ‘world comparative law’ that does not bow to any one centre and instead engages with the distinctive but entangled constitutional regimes all over the world.