Legal Imaginaries Of Crisis And Fear (dark Constitutionalism)

This book explores the epistemological, semiotic, semantic, and heuristic dimensions of the dark emotions in constitutional and international law.

This book explores the epistemological, semiotic, semantic, and heuristic dimensions of the dark emotions in constitutional and international law. We are living in times of crisis and emergency where negative emotions and dark feelings are abundant. As these have come to form the intellectual and socio-legal context for the performance of constitutional and international law, this book explores their place – especially the politics of fear, but also anger, hate, despair, and crisis – in our current constitutional polycrisis. Focusing on this ‘dark constitutionalism’, the book draws together an international and interdisciplinary range of scholars to consider the place of emotive semiotics in collective meaning making, the constitutional politics of emotions, and emotional approaches to global challenges in a time of crisis, emergency, and transition. The book thereby develops a compelling analysis of the use of negative emotions in the shaping of contemporary constitutional imaginaries, and with it a novel account of the rise of dark constitutionalism. This book will appeal to researchers and scholars working in the areas of legal theory, legal philosophy, constitutional law, international law, and socio-legal studies.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Chapter 1: The Concept of Dark Constitutionalism
Martin Belov

Chapter 2: Is it the End of the World as We Know it? The Heuristics of Fear and Apocalyptic Visions in Politics
Marta Soniewicka

Chapter 3: “Nothing Spreads Like Fear”. From the Government of the Plague to the Crime of Contagion
Emilia Musumeci

Chapter 4: Constitutional Over-Belief: Affective Intensity as a Function of Legitimation
Richard Sherwin

Chapter 5: Revolutionary Constitutions and their Constitutionalism: The Internalization of Fear as Process and the Performance of Crisis in the Service of Stability
Larry Catá Backer

Chapter 6: From Fear to Hope: Law and Emotions'' Response to Global Challenges
Julia Wesołowska

Chapter 7: Politics of Fear and Social Transformation Through the Lens of Legal Politics
Mario Krešić

Chapter 8: (Re)Invention of Memory. Constitutional Narratives in Central European – Sombre or Luminous?
Mirosław M. Sadowski

Chapter 9: Trauma, Melancholia and the Law
Sabarish Suresh

Chapter 10: Crisis Affects in the International Legal Discourse
Jean D’Aspremont

Chapter 11: Terrorism as Imaginary: Creating Politics of Fear
Vesselin Popovski

Chapter 12: Climate Alarmism and Denialism
Shalvi Ponwar

Conclusion: Pulsing Constitutionalism and the Dichotomy between Dark and Bright Constitutionalism as Driving Force in Constitutional Space-Time
Martin Belov

Martin Belov is Professor in Constitutional and Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Sofia ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’. He is Vice Dean of the University of Sofia ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’, Faculty of Law.