The Multicultural Constitution

The Multicultural Constitution

The course will relate the work of contemporary political theorists on multiculturalism to the work of the Colombian Constitutional Court on intercultural relations, as well as to the recent constitutional processes that ended with the new Constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. Colombia’s constitutional norms on cultural diversity are among the most progressive in Latin America, so to study the Colombian case is to study the way in which many legal experts and politicians believe that Latin American cultural minorities should be accommodated. Similarly, to understand adequately the dynamics of multiculturalism in contemporary Latin America, we have to comprehend how intercultural relations are regulated in Ecuador’s and Bolivia’s new Political Charters. The course will also compare the experiences of Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador with those of liberal democracies in the Global North, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The course will evaluate if political theorists have adequately confronted the problem of radical difference and jurists have found a conceptually coherent framework within which to work out conflicting demands that emerge in culturally diverse liberal democracies. It will use a critical analysis of political theory to derive a set of theoretical tools with which first to organize and appraise the Constitution and judicial opinions, and then to point the way forward to a genuinely multicultural constitutionalism.