Rethinking the socio-economic nexus: judicial sense-making at the intersection of international economic law and the Colombian constitution

This paper reframes Latin American debates about the limited potential of constitutions to redistribute resources and power more equitably throughout society. It does so by exploring how the Colombian Constitutional Court has made sense of the role that constitutional law, interacting with international economic law, plays in the promotion of wealth and well-being. We argue that this sense-making constrains the radical potential of the constitution by contributing to a particular articulation of the economy–society nexus, one that is underpinned by colonial and racial capitalist logics that obfuscate the exploitation and appropriation by capital of the wealth generated by our earth and labour, and their consequent immiseration. This is done through an analysis of four rulings which illustrate the Court’s production of a legal imaginary where social ‘goods’ like environmental protection and socio-economic rights are conceived of as positive externalities deriving from (trade-led) growth and development. Shedding light on the extractivist qualities of this legal sense-making matters because it exposes the constraining effects that the positing of a particular economic rationality as a universal truth (i.e. trade for growth leading to environmental protection and the amelioration of socio-economic inequalities) has on the possibility of thinking about different socio-legal-economic systems.