To enhance our understanding of systemic corruption and its effects on the freedom of individuals, I undertook a research project under the sponsorship of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at University of Cambridge to develop a plebeian theory of rights in which rights do not originate in natural law but in power relations and the juridical protections resulting from the conflict between the powerful few and the many.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowhsip (2021-2023)
—This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101023197—
The project had three specific goals:
1) to break new theoretical ground in the study of rights by proposing an interpretation of rights that does not begin from an ideal position of equality, but rather from a position that acknowledges material inequalities as the only way to correct the very unequal enjoyment of formal rights;
2) to influence the making of constitutional law and constitutional amendments to incorporate socioeconomic rights as well as new institutions to guarantee them; and
3) to socialize this new material way of thinking about the constitution and basic rights amongst the general public.
Members of housing committees meet at an underpass in Santiago, Chile to deliberate on the right to housing. October 2022
2022 draft constitution, chile
My most important contributions to the constitutional draft were:
1) the alternative material framework I proposed, which put the emphasis on the codification of socioeconomic rights and the institutions and mechanisms necessary to enforce them. In this line, I proposed a Human Rights Ombudsman to monitor, promote, and guarantee the enjoyment of rights;
2) the right of communities to have decisionmaking power at the local level; and
3) popular mechanisms of direct democracy to repeal law, amend the constitution, and initiate a new constituent process.
Graphic design by Marcela Suárez. Colectivo Cabildos Constituyentes
impact
My work on material constitutionalism and plebeian rights had real-time impact on the constituent process in Chile (June 2021- May 2022). My ideas and proposals reached elected officials in the Constitutional Convention as well as grassroots organizers and local councils. I worked remotely from the UK giving advice and proposals on constitutional rights and direct democracy to the most progressive leaders in the Convention, as well as to the social organizations that wanted to use the participatory mechanisms to propose their own articles for the new Constitution.
Right to Housing
In collaboration with community-based organizations, I devised a set of rules and procedures to guarantee equality and free speech within the internal operation of these organizations, and a deliberative process for elaborating articles collectively from the ground up. A few of the articles elaborated in this manner made it into the text. Perhaps the most noteworthy was the right to housing, enabled by the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha (MPL).
Several housing committees made up of families with precarious housing or without a home came to the capital, Santiago, to meet and elaborate together a right to housing that would truly convey the needs of the common people. I designed an ad hoc process for that meeting that included working groups selected at random, free association of qualifying concepts, collective construction of simple sentences, and ranked voting to decide among alternatives. The result of this deliberative experiment was the most robust constitutional right to housing every written, and it made it almost intact into the constitutional draft.
popular pedagogy
Invited by grassroots organizations in Chile, I taught a weekly open access class to grassroots organizers on YouTube for three months on constitutional rights, direct democracy mechanisms, and the process of constitution making.
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Logo of the collective Cabildos Constituyentes designed by Marcela Suárez.