Demanding a Radical Constitution: Reflections from Chile’s 2022 Reform Effort

The Law Session resumes on September 20 with a talk by Javiera Barandiaran and Tristan Partridge:

Demanding a Radical Constitution: Reflections from Chile’s 2022 Reform Effort

This seminar takes place from 10am to 12pm, both face-to-face at Sciences Po, in room K.008, and remotely on zoom. If you would like to attend, please contact Samia Ben.

Summary:

In July 2021, after delays caused by the Covid pandemic and in response to massive social uprisings that began in October 2019, Elisa Loncon was elected president of Chile’s Constitutional Convention. For the first time in living memory, Chileans were addressed by a high-ranking elected representative, at an official event of the greatest importance, in an Indigenous language. Speaking in her native Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people, Loncon welcomed people from across Chile, naming each region, to participate in this historic process. She gave a special welcome to queer people and to women, and offered a message of hope for re-founding Chile through a participative and democratic process into a plurinational, intercultural, and plurilingual state, which would be respectful of Nature and women’s rights and stand in solidarity with those who have suffered globally. For the next 12 months the Constitutional Convention members – all but a handful civilians with no political party affiliation, democratically elected, and 17 of them Indigenous – produced a text that delivered on Loncon’s vision. But this text was approved by only 38% of Chileans. The majority rejected it. Drawing on research by students and faculty, this book explores just some of the most innovative ideas in this failed text and the process that produced it, including the modes of public participation used; efforts to redefine science, bioethics, and common goods with consequences for mining or the night sky; and ecological provisions like Rights of Nature and an Attorney General for Nature. These ideas are too important to be forgotten.

Javiera Barandiaran is Associate Professor in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of UCSB’s Center for Restorative Environmental Work. She has published three books, including Science and Environment in Chile: The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy (MIT Press, 2018) and Rights of Nature: Arguments for Chile’s Constitution (Ocho Libros, 2022; co-authored and in Spanish), and numerous articles, book chapters and edited volumes on topics including how markets for science erode public trust, the shortcomings of environmental impact assessments, energy justice and, most recently, the challenge of fossil fuel decommissioning. She is currently writing a book about lithium mining (MIT Press, expected 2025) and through CREW published two decarbonization maps: one on California and one on Chile.

Tristan Partridge is Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Burning Diagrams in Anthropology (punctum 2024), Energy and Environmental Justice (Palgrave 2022), and Movements, Solidarities, and Critical Connections; Demanding a Radical Constitution: Environmentalism, Resilience, and Participation in Chile’s 2022 Reform Efforts (co-edited with J. Barandiaran). His collaborative documentary photography has been published in the monograph, Mingas+Solidarity.