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Abstract
This essay proposes the epistemic ethos of passionate humility for knowledge production about global constitutionalism in the aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By employing the conceptual strategy of elucidation, passionate humility can reveal a counter-intuitively counter-hegemonic use of the global constitutionalist triad of human rights, democracy and the rule of law in the Ukrainian resistance against Russia's war. As an approach to knowledge production, passionate humility addresses epistemic ignorance by retrieving situated non-imperial knowledges while also confronting the ambivalent politics of such knowledges. It therefore hints at how we can both decentre and make use of resources associated with global constitutionalism, without valorizing western elitist discourses, reinscribing the inter-imperial mode of knowledge production or sanitizing vernacular knowledges. Passionate humility does so in three moves: it problematizes hegemonic epistemic frames (either west-centred or Russia-centred); it foregrounds complex social agency, which resists a fixed theoretical or ideological language; and it reveals the contextual deployment of the Occidentalist language of global constitutionalism in the Ukrainian public discourse as a practice of negotiated subjecthood. Such practice can be counter-hegemonic without being inherently progressive.

AbstractThe promise of constitutionalisation is, according to Kratochwil, the existential comfort that comes from having a coherent framework for judgement and action. This apparent epistemological confidence comes at the price of parting with a realistic assessment of the concrete situation, and it conceals that politics operate across all levels all the time. This paper critiques this vision and points beyond the idea of exhaustive frameworks. Figuring out contextually appropriate configurations of constitutionalisation and fragmentation allows for greater agency and pluralism. A more fundamental tension in Kratochwil's work remains, however, his falling back on the abstract to articulate the experiential.

The contemporary global academic is an exemplary neoliberal subject. This condition is, of course, not unreflected upon, even if those communities of scholars dubbed 'critical' and 'problem-solving' might address it in different ways. The critical crowd is, however, caught in a particular predicament: We enact and embody neoliberal discourse in our daily practice, all the while raging about the psychosocial harm it inflicts. Indeed, though working within an industry ever more industrialised in conformity with the violent economic technologies of precarity, competition, quantification, standardisation, and individualism, considerable professional rewards remain on offer for those who master 'the game.' We become academic subjects in and by 'making deals' at the juncture of productive and coercive power—that is, by reproducing hierarchies. The discourse of personal triumph against neoliberal adversity—performed, if in different ways, by critical and mainstream scholars alike—is part and parcel of becoming a good player, of generating affective and socio-economic payoffs, and, ultimately, of re-entrenching the neoliberal condition. This essay does not argue for a second-order responsibilisation of this already tormented subject—to radicalise not-yet-brutal-enough self-appraisals. Rather, it is concerned with a certain disavowal of responsibility which derives from the implication in our own and each other's suffering, as formulated in Lynne Layton's work. Instead of offering consolation in response to the neoliberal suffering, and thus deepen the collusion, I suggest a re-thinking of responsibility in response to the concreteness of the neoliberal pain. Expressed and theorised from within the lived experienced of academic anguish, this is as much an autobiographical as a sociological tale.

AbstractThis paper develops what I call "the ethics of opaqueness" as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the "hermeneutics of suspicion." In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference—that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of "uninterpretable moments" in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

Local ownership has become a central norm of international statebuilding while its practice is seen as failure. This is explained either as an instance of organised hypocrisy where the norm is de facto circumvented or, in a critical vein, as a hegemonic projection of the neoliberal system of governance which by default erases local agency. Practitioners of statebuilding are seen as agents of moulding; social engineers in the policy discourse or conduits of the discursive structure from which they derive their 'professional reflex' and authority in the critical discourse. This article suggests that both designations misdiagnose the problem of action as being 'caused' by either norm transfer, or by norms being 'ingrained' in professional practices. It adopts a micro-perspective on the practice of embedded experts in a series of EU-sponsored projects to offer a contextual account of an on-the-ground interaction. The encounter between Polish and Ukrainian border guards highlights differential power relations and demonstrates the rich texture of the semantic field of 'local ownership'. The case nuances arguments about tacit institutional reproduction in transnational settings and the automaticity of norm diffusion among security professionals to illustrate instead a contingent role of 'practicality by judgement' in their action. . Adapted from the source document.