Democracies are facing a renewal of polarizing political disputes over the principles, rights and values that should organize social life. The Brexit referendum in the UK, the peace treaty in Colombia, the plebiscite for a new Constitution in Chile, the Supreme Court’s overturn of abortion rights in the US, and immigration and refugee policies across the EU, among many other examples around the globe, are expressive of the many ways in which deep-seated normative conflicts in society are translated into legal and constitutional struggles about the form of rights. Most of these cases underscore the dilemmas that contemporary constitutional democracies face to enact and sustain the very idea of rights in the context of divided, almost unbridgeable social worlds.

This special issue aims to expand our understanding of such “constitutional struggles” in terms of conflicts over the boundaries that define political belonging and exclusion. It looks at the moral discourse that underlies the activity of boundary-making (Lamont and Molnár, 2002): namely, the linguistic production, circulation, appropriation and contestation of values, norms and emotions that set the terms for how certain peoples and forms of life are to be valued and treated in different socio-historical contexts (Fassin, 2009). Although constitutional disputes are a springboard for language practices that aim to fix social positions, the papers in this issue will bring attention to the fluid and often unstable configuration of boundaries in terms of narrative boundaries.

We propose the notion of narrative boundaries as a heuristic for grasping how boundaries are produced by stories and storytelling practices (Eder, 2006; Gubrium and Holstein, 2009). By telling and sharing stories, social groups situate themselves in a temporal space, activate modes of relationality, and reinforce inclusiveness and strangeness (Somers, 1994), but in so doing the construction and dispute of these very stories become part and parcel of societal struggles on how to live together (Smith, 2007; Zigon, 2012). Consequently, even if the boundaries that such stories draw are not always clear, differences become symbolically intelligible in the modes of sense making, representation, and emplotting of their components (events, characters, concepts, objects; Ricouer, 1984; Toolan 2001; Frei, 2015; Forchtner, 2021), materially embedded in the sociotechnical networks and wider social discourses through which they circulate and acquire traction (Wodak et al. 2009; Reisigl and Wodak, 2009), and morally consequential in the positioning of values and emotions that divide social groups through strategies of demarcation (Forchtner and Kølvraa, 2012) and modes of evaluation (Labov, 1985).

Based on this broad conceptualization, the special issue aims to make an original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of language and politics, as it brings into dialogue empirically oriented approaches to narratives and contemporary discussions on the moral universe of constitutional struggles. We draw on the concept of moral economy precisely because it encapsulates the ways in which disputes between social groups, from redistribution of wealth (Mau, 2007) through the racialization of borders (Fassin, 2019) to childbearing (Yopo, 2021), involve a complex process of appropriation, circulation, and exchange of moral values. As groups attempt to justify, enforce, modify, or contest certain institutional arrangements, they enact and elicit discursive strategies of boundary-making between different identities and forms of life.

The special issue will contribute to go beyond the often legalistic and formalistic approaches to constitutional crises and conflicts as it addresses the multiple ways in which constitutional principles and rights are imagined, defended, and contested in social life through narrativization (Cover 1983). Following recent developments in the sociology of constitutions and critical legal studies (Frank, 2009; Blokker, 2020; Cordero, 2019; Lazar, 2021; Scheppele, 2017), the running thread of the special issue is that much of present constitutional struggles are politically entangled with and socially produced through contesting narratives of polarized collective identities and divided social worlds.

Within this general framework, the special issue will bring together theoretically informed, interdisciplinary oriented, and empirically case-based articles that address the moral economy of contemporary constitutional struggles in terms of narrative struggles.

The papers in this issue are expected to draw on a variety of data (e.g., social media, records of constitutional debates, jurisprudence and court rulings, qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, images and visual representations, archives of state commissions, political speeches from electoral campaigns, social movements demonstrations) and analytical approaches (e.g., critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, discourse theory, rhetoric, semiotics) to explore how narratives mobilized around the issue of “rights” draw lines of demarcation which crystallize and reproduce contrasting moral economies between social groups. The papers will explore topics, including but not limited to the following:

 Constitutional Referendums 

 Normative disputes around right entitlements 

 Peace agreements and conflict resolution 

 Constitutional disputes about abortion, gender, and female rights  Migratory law, citizenship, and contested rights 

 Ethnic conflicts and narrative boundaries 

 Legal narratives of social movements and subaltern groups

Please send your abstract of up to 400 words to rodrigo.cordero@udp.cl and raimundo.frei@udp.cl by March 5, 2023. Please clearly state the aims and research questions of your paper, its theoretical/conceptual underpinning, the data, and analytical methods used as well as indicative findings and contributions. Accepted abstracts will be required to engage theoretically with notions such as boundaries, narratives, constitutional struggles, moral economy (depending on the paper’s focus) and deal with the discursive/language aspect of the empirical case.

Please send queries and expressions of interest to the email addresses provided above.