Professor Christine Bell

Inaugural lecture of Professor Christine Bell, 6 December 2011.

Event details

Lecture title: 'Constitutional Futures and Political Imagination: Dealing with Conflict'

Date: 6 December 2011, 5pm

Venue: Auditorium lecture theatre, Business School

Lecture abstract

This lecture will examine how societies with deep and violent divisions try to find ways of transcending conflict through constitutional innovation.

The lecture will propose and demonstrate how a form of 'hybrid' self-determination has come to fashion a new 'internationalized, transitional constitutionalism' as conflict-resolution device.

The lecture will explore the creative ways in which this new constitutionalism navigates between normative order and conflict resolution technique, and between legal text and political imagination.

The lecture will consider what lessons these attempts to create constitutional futures out of a violent pasts have for other futures, including the constitutional future of Scotland, and the future of constitutional law itself.

Lecture video