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A transdisciplinary account of the polemical vocabularies of sovereignty, democracy, self-determination, constituent power, and constitutionalism, this book is a pioneering attempt to systematically envision these ideals and polemical concepts, not just as the objects of scholarly inquiry, but also as products of theoretical imaginations.
About the author
Zoran Oklopcic is an associate professor at the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. He earned his SJD from the University of Toronto. He has been a MacCormick Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh; a member of the junior faculty at Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy in Doha, Qatar; and a Hauser Global Research Fellow at NYU School of Law.
Summary
Beyond the People develops a provocative, interdisciplinary, and meta-theoretical critique of the idea of popular sovereignty. It asks simple but far-reaching questions: Can 'imagined' communities, or 'invented' peoples, ever be theorized without, at the same time, being re-imagined and re-invented anew? Can polemical concepts, such as popular sovereignty or constituent power, be theorized objectively? If, as this book argues, the answer to these questions is no, theorists who approach the figure of a sovereign people must acknowledge that their activity is inseparable from the practice of constituent imagination.
Though widely accepted as important, even vital, for the development of political concepts, the social practice of imagination is almost always presumed to operate either historically or impersonally, but seldom individually. Those who theorize the figures of popular sovereignty do not see that they are, in effect, 'conjurors' of peoplehood. This book invites constitutional, international, normative, and other political and legal theorists of sovereign peoplehood to embrace the conjuring-side of their professional identities, as a way of exploring the possibility of moving beyond eternally recurring, insolvable, and increasingly irrelevant questions. Instead of asking: Who is the people? What is the function of constituent power? Where may the people exercise its right to self-determination? Beyond the People asks the reader to consider the prospect of a riskier and more adventurous theoretical road, that opens with the question: What do I as a 'theorist-imaginer', or 'conjuror of peoplehood', assume, anticipate, and aspire to as I theorize the vehicles that mediate the assumptions, anticipations, and aspirations of others? This question is examined throughout the book as it interrogates the idea of peoplehood beyond disciplinary boundaries, showing how polemical, visual, affective, conceptual, and allegorical language critically shapes our idea of peoplehood. It offers a nuanced account of the contested relationship between the social imaginary of peoplehood on the ground, and the imaginative practices of the professional 'conjurors' of peoplehood in the academy.
Additional text
This is an ambitious, brilliant, and difficult book. Instead of (yet again) calling for more imagination in legal and political thinking, it shows us what the exercise of imagination looks like. Full of metaphors, figures, and images, as well as dense engagements with modern theories about nationhood, this work invites us not to fix- again- the meaning of notions such as nation, people, or self-determination, but instead to view what happens in such fixing. As elusive as the world it seeks to map, this work offers less an agenda than sharp and original insight into the trajectories, openings, and limits of our inherited political imaginaries. As nationalisms are resurgent, this is surely welcome.
