I am delighted to pass along the announcement of the publication of a set f brilliant essays in Legal Imaginaries of Crisis and Fear: Dark Constitutionalism (Martin Belov, ed., Routledge 2026). In its website the work is described as follows:
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.
The Table of Contents follows below.
The draft of my contribution, Revolutionary Constitutions and their Constitutionalism: The Internalisation of Fear as Process and the Performance of Crisis in the Service of Stability, may be accessed HERE. The PPT of my presentation of that contribution may be accessed HERE. The abstract of the contribution also follows below.
Legal Imaginaries of Crisis and Fear: Dark Constitutionalism (Martin Belov, ed., Routledge 2026)
Chapter 1: The Concept of Dark Constitutionalism
Martin Belov
Chapter 2: Is it the End of the World as We Know it? Apocalyptic Narratives in Political Debates and the Heuristics of Fear
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 Internalisation 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 Michał 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
Pulsing Constitutionalism and the Dichotomy between Dark and Bright
Constitutionalism as Driving Force in Constitutional Space-Time
Martin Belov
* * *
Larry Catá Backer:
Abstract: The object of revolutionary constitutionalism—the fundamental basis of constitutional design and perception since the late 18th century (though with antecedents well before then), is to preserve a revolutionary settlement of a political-economic order by cultivating revolutionary dialectic (rather than suppressing them) within revolutionary structures, now memorialized in a constitutional document. The object is redirection—from the utilization of revolutionary dialectics against a post-revolutionary apparatus now in power to an instrument for the preservation and affirmation of that post-revolutionary apparatus. It becomes a mimetic device denatured and now serving an apparatus. Stability is not forever; it retains its power at least until the fundamental contradictions of this revolutionary constitutional order collapse the system. At some point, the revolutionary dialectics that produced the post-revolutionary order will itself target that ordering from the outside. What remains is the cyclicity of dialectic—fear, response-reconstruction—rather than the systems to which it furthers from one to another stage of human historical development. It is to the preservation of that emotional explosion, and its alignment with core constitutional text, that constitutions devote time and effort, usually in its preambular text, and sometimes in extraconstitutional documents with quasi-constitutional significance. If powerful enough, the emotive semiotic of constitutional explosion can affect not just its political community but those of other political communities looking for a way to rationalize and direct their own collective political emotion. The focus of this essay, then, will be on the way that emotive context is transposed from revolution to post-revolutionary constitutional text in distinctive contexts—a revolution to preserve traditional values; a communist revolution within a multi-state imperial power; a revolution with a long fuse grounded in anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism; and an ethno-revolution embedded within multilateral managerialism. To those ends the essay first looks to a powerful instance of emotive semiotics, the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), and its reflection in the subtextual mimetic dialectics of threat and crisis and resolution in the U.S. federal Constitution (1789). It then considers its value as a template for the constitutionalization of separation in the 21st century through the lens of the preambular texts of the Chinese (1982) and Cuban (2019) constitutions. All of these emotive revolutionary impulses are then transposed into and as the constitutional settlement within which the revolutionary is to be distilled, tamed, and contained within their respective ideological cages.
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