Vulnerable Insiders: Constitutional Design, International Law and the Victims of Armed Conflict in Colombia

This article, prepared for a conference on “The External Dimensions of Constitutions” held at the University of Cambridge in September 2016, explains how the Colombian Constitutional Court constructed a set of rights for a group of vulnerable insiders—victims of the country’s long-running internal armed conflict. The Court based its jurisprudence on a 1991 constitutional design that turned towards international law as a way of resolving a severe domestic crisis of violence and legitimacy. The Court has drawn heavily on principles of international human rights law and international humanitarian law to develop a set of protections for Colombia’s massive population of internally displaced persons, as well as to protect the rights of victims to receive adequate access to truth, justice, and reparations during peace processes with illegal armed groups. The Court has generally developed a model of intervention that emphasizes the rights of victims while preserving flexibility for the state in order to avoid disruption of delicate peace processes. It has also successfully drawn on a logic of solidarity that identifies victims as deserving and overlooked recipients of aid by the Colombian state. This very logic may identify a potential limit of the model: a strategy based on solidarity may successfully incorporate overlooked insiders, such as internally displaced persons, but it is unclear whether it will prove as successful with outsiders such as cross-border refugees

Comment on "Layering transition in confined molecular thin films: Nucleation and growth"

When fluid is confined between two molecularly smooth surfaces to a few molecular diameters, it shows a large enhancement of its viscosity. From experiments it seems clear that the fluid is squeezed out layer by layer. A simple solution of the Stokes equation for quasi-two-dimensional confined flow, with the assmption of layer-by-layer flow is found. The results presented here correct those in Phys. Rev. B, 50, 5590 (1994), and show that both the kinematic viscosity of the confined fluid and the coefficient of surface drag can be obtained from the time dependence of the area squeezed out. Fitting our solution to the available experimental data gives the value of viscosity which is ~7 orders of magnitude higher than that in the bulk.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Populist Constitutions

This Essay draws on recent academic definitions of populism and recent examples of its use in order to show that there is an affinity between populism and widespread constitutional change. It argues that populists use constitutional change to carry out three functions: deconstructing the old institutional order, developing a substantive project rooted in a critique of that order, and consolidating power in the hands of populists. Thus, access to the tools of constitutional change may accentuate both the promise of populism as a corrective to stagnating liberal democracies and the threat that it poses to those constitutional orders. I also argue that there is a trajectory to populist constitutionalism: populist constitutions begin by emphasizing their promise to improve on existing liberal-democratic constitutional orders and obscuring their underlying consolidation of power, but if populists are able to maintain power for long periods of time, they will likely become overtly illiberal, arguing that their substantive goals cannot be met within the confines of liberal democracy. This suggests at least two separate agendas: one that prevents the forms of constitutional change that allow populists to mold the constitutional order so that they become difficult to dislodge and a second that makes a stronger affirmative case for the virtues of liberal democracy