This research project explores the decolonial critique of the Indian and South African Constitutions that is currently gaining traction. According to this critique, these two constitutions are prime examples of epistemicide 2.0 – moments, that is, when ‘mentally colonised’ post-colonial constitution-makers perpetuated the suppression of Indigenous constitutional imaginaries through their attachment to Western constitutionalist ideas. The project’s core contribution is to refract this critique through the lens of ‘reflexive globalisation’ – a theorisation that views globalisation as involving, not the unilateral projection of the Global North into the Global South, but rather their mutual interpenetration. According to this understanding, neither the Indian nor the South African Constitution is best seen as the product of the one-sided borrowing of Western constitutionalist ideas. Rather, each of them emerged out of a syncretic process in which a victorious liberation movement drew on the resources of liberal constitutionalism to give expression to its tradition of anti-colonial struggle. In so doing, they developed and deepened liberal constitutionalism in ways that are relevant to the revival of this mode of governance in the West.
