Prof Anne Peters (Director, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) gave a talk on 'Global Constitutionalism: The Social Dimension' for the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law.

Hyper-globalisation and global supply chains have exacerbated and globalised the social question and have thus raised new types of critique and brought new expectations to international law. But it is argued that our post-2015 international legal order has responded by forming an overall ‘more social’ international law. The important interim finding is that this new body of law is characterized by its cross-border social responsibility for individuals. It is submitted that this ‘more social’ and individual-focused international law can be well understood and developed further within a framework of global constitutionalism. The most important reason for absorbing the social question is to mitigate the neo-liberal tilt of global constitutionalism. Only the full integration of the social question, understood as a global question, into the programme of global constitutionalism will be able to rescue that programme from becoming reduced to a much-loathed ‘new constitutionalism’, denounced as a political project to deepen the power of capital and to extend a ‘market civilisation’ in which the transnational investor is the principal political subject and in which the social is kept out and down.