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Constitution and Jurisdiction in Neal Stephenson’s Speculative Fiction

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posted on 2024-05-09, 10:03 authored by Steve Crawford
A common feature of Neal Stephenson’s speculative fiction is the richly imagined political communities inhabited by his characters. Geographically defined constitutional states are reimagined, often with a focus on associations based on shared social identity or beliefs, as opposed to nation-state citizenship. Stephenson’s works offer an imaginative space for exploring possibilities of alternative political communities, and questions of constitution and jurisdiction. Modern territorially sovereign nation-states have presented constitutional scholars with a fixed framework. People sharing physical space constitute a political association stemming from a moment of legal constitution. Thus constituted, the nation-state authorises governmental entities to oversee the populace within the shared geographical space. Stephenson’s rich imagination offers constitutional scholarship an imaginary for exploring alternative conceptualisations of constitution and jurisdiction. This article proposes that recovery of medieval conceptualisations of overlapping networked jurisdictions might aid in sensemaking of models of political communities beyond the territorially sovereign nation-state.

History

Author affiliation

College of Social Sci Arts and Humanities/Leicester Law School

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Law, Technology and Humans

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pagination

35 - 47

Publisher

Queensland University of Technology

eissn

2652-4074

Copyright date

2024

Available date

2024-05-09

Language

en

Deposited by

Mr Stephen Crawford

Deposit date

2024-05-08

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