Conference on: Identity, Constitutionalism and Citizens’ Attitudes

About the event

Institute for the Interregional Study of Constitutionalism, is please to invite you to:

Conference on:

Identity, Constitutionalism and Citizens’ Attitudes

December 1, 2022

Faculty of Law, Charles University, Prague

The universalism, individualism, and objective rationality of rights and of constitutionalism as their enforcement framework seems to be insufficient in themselves to foster collective political identity. This void has been too often filled with extra-constitutional sources of identity, such as ethnicity, nation, religion, etc. Yet, there might be a solution from within constitutionalism. Different concepts, such as liberal nationalism, constitutional patriotism, Islamic constitutionalism and, our proposal, identity constitutionalism, have been developed in attempts to ground constitutionalism in local values so that citizens can see it as an instrument through which a community constitutes itself as a polity. These approaches face, however, the problem of how to operationalize identity and measure attitudes that constitute identity. This conference aims to discuss the contours of a new constitutional methodology and interpret the preliminary results of qualitative research regarding citizens’ constitutional attitudes in selected countries in the EU and the MENA region.

Program

9:15  Opening of the conference

9:30 – 11:15  Panel I: Identity and Constitution           Chair: Beáta Bakó

Tomáš Dumbrovský and Volker Kaul (Charles University, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies): Identity Constitutionalism: Theory and Methodology

Abdeljabbar Arrach (Hassan I University): Constitutions and Democratization in MENA

Gina Gustavsson (Uppsala University): Liberal National Identity: Thinner than Conservative, Thicker than Civic? (online)

Discussion

Coffee break

11:45 – 14:00   Panel II: Citizens’ Attitudes           Chair: Zoubair Khouaja

Balázs Fekete (Eötvös Loránd University): Studying Rights Consciousness in Hungary. Why? How? What?

Hadia Yahiaoui (Khenchela University): Constitutionalism and the Arab Spring

Petra Guasti (Charles University): Polarization and Populism during Covid-19. Results of the SYRI Project

Dorian Alt (Charles University): Identity Constitutionalism: Citizens’ Constitutional Attitudes in the EU and MENA

Discussion

End of the conference