Normative Constitutional Theory in a Multipolar World: New Global Perspectives

Programme

Chair: Sanja Badanjak (University of Edinburgh)

Presentations

12:30:-12:50      Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh), Framing the Discussion on Multipolarity and Normative Constitutional Theory: From (Universal) Liberalism to the (Pluriversal) Common Good? 

12:50-13:10       René Tapia Herrera (University of Barcelona), Intersecting and Contradictory Paths to the Common Good in Latin America: Comparative Archaeology of Catholic, Liberal, and Marxist Principles in the Chilean Constitutional Laboratory 

13:10-13:30       Karim Sadek (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies), Entering Democracy Through the Doors of Islam: Public Contestation, Maslaha, and Agonistic Civility

13:30-13:50       Tom Angier (University of Cape Town), A Politics of Virtue: Neo-Aristotelian Meets African Philosophy

13:50-14:10       Elena Ziliotti (Delft University of Technology), Confucianism, Constitutionalism, and the Challenges of ‘non-Western’ Political Theory

14:10-14:30       Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne (University of Dundee), Buddhist Constitutional Reflections on Virtue and the Common Good 

14:30-14:50       Break

Responses

14:50-15:00       Muhammet Mete (ECCL) 

15:00-15:10       Juliane Müller (ECCL)

15:10-15:20       Peter Reid (ECCL)

15:20-15:30       Taehyeon Kim (ECCL)

15:30-15:40       Jakub Babuska (ECCL)

15:40-15:50       Break

Discussion

15:50-16:50       Q&A

16:50-17:00       Asanga Welikala, Closing Remarks

Tom Angier

Title

A Politics of Virtue: Neo-Aristotelian Meets African Philosophy

Abstract

My paper will draw on neo-Aristotelian and African ethical and political traditions to argue that political communities cannot survive – let alone thrive – without putting a concern for virtue at their heart. Here are some key themes I shall explore:

1. Guaranteeing political rights is an essential aspect of any just political community. But contra much contemporary thought, rights are not the proper focus of a healthy state. Rather, they are essential conditions of positive, virtuous, action. So insofar as a ‘right’ undermines such action, it is a pseudo-right. And insofar as rights are valued systematically above virtue, they have become politically dysfunctional.
2. States have an obligation to protect and encourage virtue among their citizens. Like the citizenry, however, the State is liable to vices of judgement and action. It is an imperfect political actor. So in order to promote virtue, it should place great weight on the principle of subsidiarity, encouraging intermediary institutions to play their proper part in inculcating and sustaining a virtuous, flourishing, nation.
3. One of the most salient institutions here is that of the family (which precedes the state). So one of the key tasks of the virtuous polity is to show strong regard for the family. Any policies that undermine the proper authority of parents, or the good of children, are vicious. Indeed, I shall argue for a ‘children-first’ ethos: a virtuous nation must safeguard and promote the good of children above all.

Along these and other dimensions I shall show how neo-Aristotelian and African Philosophy complement each other and help us formulate a robust, realistic, politics of virtue for the modern state.

Bio

Tom Angier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His research interests lie in Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian ethical and political theory. His most recent monograph is on Natural Law Theory (Cambridge 2021), which is accompanied by two edited collections: The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics (2019) and The Cambridge Handbook to Natural Law and Human Rights (2023). In February 2026 he will publish another, much fuller, monograph entitled Human Nature, Human Goods: A Theory of Natural Perfectionism (also with Cambridge). His next project is on political perfectionism in a neo-Aristotelian mould.

Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne

Title 

Buddhist Constitutional Reflections on Virtue and the Common Good

Abstract

In the Global South, the model called the ‘civilisational state’ has sought to revive pre-Western principles of indigenous social order and assert them as moral and material imperatives for a post-western world order, but often for the task of ethno-religious forms of popular sovereignty. 

Liberal constitutionalism is organised around the principle of limited government, individual rights and judicial oversight of executive power, but the liberal constitutional model has been systematically compromised by the rise of populist modes of expressive and often performative sovereignty – the civilisational state. Progressive forms of constitutional government need to find alternative modes of organisation that while harnessing religio-cultural forms, do so in a manner that does not fetishise or ossify religio-cultural forms of expression that serve only reactive interests.

My focus is not so much the form that the proto-Buddhist state took in South and Southeast Asia (although I do not eschew this matter from the proceeding analysis), but rather the motivating (ontological) constitutional features of the proto-Buddhist state. I therefore set out a framework for thinking through what the category of common good constitutionalism might look like in the Buddhist discourse and praxis of constitutional law and politics – a task all the more merited given that secularism in South and Southeast Asia has given rise to the secularisation of religion, an increasingly dominant worldview informed by modernist categories that ossify and fetishize religious discourse and practice. 

Instead, the pre-European Buddhist South and Southeast Asia gave rise to a state form, within the overall umbrella of the symbolic over-lordship of the Buddhist king, which was devolutionary and asymmetrical in its institutional form with a high degree of autonomy at the peripheries and articulated what can be characterise as the common good oriented by the principles of Buddhist virtue (sīla), the basis of the Buddhist path.

Bio

Dr Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne (School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Dundee) is Lecturer in Law at Dundee Law School. He teaches Public Law, Torts and English Property Law. His current research draws on both continental philosophy and post-colonial theory for the purpose of critically surveying how the idea of virtue (sīla) in Buddhist thought has informed both Buddhist theories of the state and constitutional practices in pre-European South and Southeast Asia in order that these ideas can be retrieved from the reactive authors of the ethno-majoritarian Buddhist civilisational state.

Karim Sadek

Title

Entering Democracy Through the Doors of Islam: Public Contestation, Maslaha, and Agonistic Civility

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on internal resources of the Islamic tradition to contribute to normative constitutional theory in a multipolar world. The argument unfolds in two steps. First, I synthesize previous work to outline a characteristically Islamic conception of radical democracy. I argue that entering democracy through the doors of Islam integrates proceduralist, republican, and agonistic features into a novel framework. Second, I derive the implications of this conception for normative constitutional theory. I contend that the aim of such theory is to enable communities to exercise their right to political self-determination while safeguarding the conditions of individual identity-formation. This model of constitutionalism can be defined by three features: (i) a foundation of public justifiability, achieved through contestation constrained by a requirement of non-authoritarian argumentation—which regulates the manner of discursive exchange rather than the content of arguments; (ii) the adoption of a maslaha-based approach to the common good as a shared normative framework that public contestation interprets and specifies; and (iii) a virtue-based public sphere ethics articulated in terms of agonistic-civility.

Bio

Karim Sadek is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research lies at the intersection of critical social theory, Islamic political thought, democratic theory, and the ethics of argumentation. By examining the necessary role of ethics in the public realm for realizing emancipatory ideals of freedom and equality, his work seeks to transcend the dichotomy between religious and secular politics, thereby reframing the central task of political theorizing around whether a politics is authoritarian, regardless of its religious or secular foundations.

René Ignacio Tapia Herrera

Title

Intersecting and Contradictory Paths to the Common Good in Latin America: Comparative Archaeology of Catholic, Liberal, and Marxist Principles in Chilean Constitutional Laboratory

Abstract

This paper develops a constitutional history of Latin America from the 19th to 21st centuries through the intersecting trajectories of Catholicism, Marxism, and Liberalism, using Chile as a paradigmatic case due to its remarkable stability, which allows us to clearly observe that major changes are due to shifts in perspective in the three political coordinates identified here. Adopting a constitutional archaeology approach, it excavates how these intellectual traditions have competed and converged over the idea of the Common Good in Chilean constitutional texts and constituent moments. The longue durée analysis reveals shifting alliances: from 19th-century struggles between Catholic conservatism and secular liberalism, to 20th-century clashes involving Marxist and socialist movements, to 21st-century attempts at synthesis in new constitutional experiments. The paper highlights how each tradition –Catholic natural law, liberal constitutionalism, and Marxist/socialist thought– envisioned the common good and sought to enshrine it in constitutional order. Chile’s constitutional evolution (1833–2026) is examined in depth as a microcosm of regional dynamics, illustrating how Catholic, Liberal and Marxist political principles evolve and reinvent themselves in order to give substance to the constitutional notion of the common good. Challenging theoretical perspectives from Gargarella, Viciano, Martínez, von Bogdandy, Uprimny, and others, the paper frames Latin America’s constitutional history as an archaeological layering of ideas of the common good. It argues that understanding this layered history is crucial for a “common good constitutionalism” that unfolds as a universal category, while also providing a better understanding of Latin American constitutional thought.

Bio

Chilean lawyer and LLM in Constitutional Law PUC. Fulbrighter and Alumni U.S. State Department. Fellowship Joan Oró FI at University of Barcelona. Member of Research Group on Democracy and Constitutionalism (GEDECO). Since 2020 involved in legislative and constitutional advisory roles within deliberative bodies of the Chilean constitutional process (2019–2023). Research interests include constitutional theory, political philosophy, constitution-making, comparative constitutional law, and international human rights law.

Elena Ziliotti

Title

Confucianism, Constitutionalism, and the Challenges of ‘non-Western’ Political Theory

Abstract

What normative framework can adequately underpin a theoretical exploration of comparative constitutionalism in a multipolar world order? This question has become urgent amid the push to decolonise academia. I argue that the hybridity of many contemporary non-Western societies means that theorists cannot ignore engaging with either Western-originated or premodern Indigenous concepts and ways of thinking that influence the local public culture. However, these normative strands alone are inadequate for grounding a contemporary theory. This methodological dilemma inevitably complicates the search for ‘Constitutional archaeology’. But it can be addressed if theorists adopt normative hybridity as a methodological stance. Normative hybridity suggests that hybridity is not only a feature of the theorist’s contextual reference but should also shape their actual approach. Normative hybridity already underpins relevant works in contemporary Confucian political theory. Drawing from these works, I illustrate three methods for applying normative hybridity to theory building. This innovative methodological approach uniquely engages with current theoretical debates and influences comparative constitutionalism.

Bio

Elena Ziliotti is an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Delft University of Technology. Elena's research centres on Western democratic theory and comparative political theory, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Confucian political thought. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the joint programme of King's College London and the National University of Singapore in 2018. Her academic articles have appeared in leading philosophy and political science journals, such as American Political Science Review and The Journal of Politics. Her first book, Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.