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Aziz Rana, “Constitutionalism and the Foundations of the Security State”
Scholars often argue that the culture of American constitutionalism provides an important constraint on aggressive national security practices. This article challenges the conventional account by highlighting instead how modern constitutional reverence emerged in tandem with the national security state, functioning critically to reinforce and legitimate government power rather than simply to place limits on it. This unacknowledged security origin of today’s constitutional climate speaks to a profound ambiguity in the type of public culture ultimately promoted by the Constitution. Scholars are clearly right to note that constitutional loyalty has created political space for arguments more respectful of civil rights and civil liberties, making the very worst excesses of the past less likely. But at the same time, public discussion around protecting the Constitution – and with it a distinctively American way of life – has also served as a key justification for strengthening the government’s security infrastructure over the long run.
In this paper, Rana argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significant popular skepticism actually existed concerning the basic legitimacy of the Constitution. But against the backdrop of World War I and the Russian Revolution, a combination of corporate, legal, and military elites initiated a concerted campaign to establish constitutional support as the paramount prerequisite of loyal citizenship. Crucially, such elites viewed the entrenchment of constitutional commitment as fundamentally a national security imperative; they called for dramatically and permanently extending the reach of the federal government’s coercive apparatus. In the process, defenders of the Constitution reproduced many of the practices we most associate with extremism and wartime xenophobia: imposed deference and ideological uniformity, appeals to exceptionalism and cultural particularity, militarism, and political repression. Moreover, the problem with such World War I origins for today’s constitutional climate is not simply that of a troubling but distant past. Rather, the foundations developed nearly a century ago continue to intertwine constitutional attachment with the prerogatives of the national security state in ways that often go unnoticed – emphasizing the real difficulties of separating the liberal and illiberal dimensions of American constitutional culture.
Aziz Rana is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School. His research interests include American constitutional law and political development, with a particular focus on citizenship, national security, and immigration. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010). His current book project, No Other Gods: Security, Citizenship, and the Victory of Constitutional Patriotism, examines how emerging constitutional veneration in the mid-twentieth century, especially in relation to national security imperatives, helped shape popular politics. Rana was an Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow in Law at Yale University. He holds an A.B. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the Charles Sumner Prize. |
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Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, “Human Security and Women’s Human Rights: Reinforcing Protection in the Context of Violence Against Women”
Considering the human security approach to critical risks and vulnerabilities, this paper explores violence against women as one of the most pervasive and widespread threats worldwide. While there is a general understanding that the human security analysis and the human rights legal framework intersect, so far the ways in which the two concepts can mutually reinforce each other has rarely been assessed. Thus, this paper looks more closely at the UN conception of human security in relation specifically to violence against women. It reflects critically on how a gendered human security would have to be shaped and studies its connection with human rights, covering the UN and regional normative landscapes and reviewing paradigmatic cases by the Inter-American and European Courts of Human Rights as exemplifying some of the potentials of the human security-human rights symbiosis. The concept of violence against women, strongly developed by international human rights law, has seldom been contemplated explicitly in human security concerns of violence. This text then examines the consequences of applying a human security lens to the legal analysis of violence against women and their human rights, and of including the human rights definition of violence against women within the human security sphere. In doing so, it spells out the added value of this dialogue and brings to light the synergies between human security and the human rights of women experiencing structural vulnerability in everyday life.
Dorothy Estrada-Tanck earned her PhD in Law from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She holds an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Escuela Libre de Derecho (Mexico City). Dorothy has worked in the field of human rights in the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Mexico City Commission of Human Rights, and as consultant with UN Women and the Mexican Supreme Court.
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