Chairs
Justin O. Frosini jfrosini@jhu.edu, justin.frosini@unibocconi.it
Ricardo Ramirez Calvo rramirezcalvo@udesa.edu.ar

In the last decade it has become clear that, along with traditional liberal- constitutional democracies, an important number of countries have embraced different forms of “illiberal” democracy, that is, they are regimes in which there are competitive elections of political authorities but that concentrate power around the executive office, to the point that even the courts are under the control of the government.

Even though in the past there have been many authoritarian, semi authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes which pretended to cloak their true nature under a constitution, recent examples have showed a current of thought which tries to present these regimes as a new and more efficient type of constitutionalism, putting into question long established notions of constitutional government.

This development has examples in different areas of the world, thus becoming a subject of study with great interest for scholars globally, in line with the international nature of the IACL. The chairs of this workshop (which is a spin-off of the decade- old IACL research group dedicated to “Constitutionalism in Illiberal Democracies” which was created in Oslo in 2014) invite proposals for papers devoted to current examples of this type of ‘constitutionalism’, but also proposals for papers that analyse past examples, in order to explore similarities, identify possible patterns of authoritarian ‘constitutionalism’ and draw lessons which may help to better understand this phenomenon.

As was case after the IACL Congresses in Seul and Johannesburg (see links below) papers that pass evaluated positively through a blind review process will be published in a special journal issue or an edited book.