Interview with Rodrigo Cordero and Raimundo Frei: Narrative Boundaries

Rodrigo Cordero and Raimundo Frei, acting as guest editors, talk to us about their upcoming Special Issue with the Journal of Language and Politics, 'Narrative boundaries: The moral economy of contemporary constitutional struggles'.

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

Our approach moves beyond viewing constitutional struggles as mere legal disputes, framing them instead as broader symbolic boundary struggles over societal values and moral principles.

Why did you decide to propose this Special Issue?

We proposed this Special Issue to address a critical gap in understanding contemporary constitutional struggles in an era of increasing political polarization. While existing research has mostly focused on quantifiable aspects of partisan divisions, we recognized the need to further examine the less measurable, discursive boundary-work performed by social groups in normative conflicts over the demarcation of rights. Our approach moves beyond viewing constitutional struggles as mere legal disputes, framing them instead as broader symbolic boundary struggles over societal values and moral principles. We aim to explore how narratives about rights function as boundary-making devices, simultaneously dividing identities and shaping social practices, political conceptions, and normative justifications. By introducing the concept of "narrative boundaries," we offer a heuristic for comprehending how moral economies are linguistically produced through stories and storytelling practices. This perspective allows us to examine the paradoxical nature of rights discourse, which seeks inclusion but often results in narratives that reinforce divisions between seemingly irreconcilable normative worlds.

What are the key takeaways we can expect?

This Special Issue makes an original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of language and politics, as it brings into dialogue empirically oriented approaches to narratives and contemporary discussions on the moral universe of constitutional struggles. The articles contribute with distinctive ways of addressing this narrative dimension of constitutional struggles in terms of boundary making. Through empirically grounded analyses on Chile, Colombia, USA, Hungary and the UK, the five contributions explore how various narrative dynamics shape moral-legal controversies over the demarcation of rights. They unpack the ways narratives temporalize these disputes, constitute subjects and forms of identification, and mobilize codes of moral classification. As we will observe in this special issue through stories about bodies, peace, property, nationhood, and citizenship, the demarcation of the form of rights, namely to whom and how they apply, is deeply intertwined with the practice of storytelling. What’s more, the articles bring into focus the dilemmas faced by contemporary constitutional democracies in enacting and sustaining the very idea of rights within the context of divided, almost unbridgeable social worlds. In the last instance, this challenge not only depends on setting institutional frameworks and legal protections, but on the very ability of social actors to articulate and nurture stories that, rather than fueling feelings of fear and repulsion toward Others, contribute to build bridges between divided moral worlds.

Building on this work, where do you plan to go next in your research?

We would like to continue our collaboration by working on a broader theoretical agenda that explores narrativization, moral economy and democracy together. The running thread of this work, which we envision taking the form of a book, is that disputes around morality are pivotal in contemporary democratic societies, and the ways in which the conflicts unfold are closely linked to the stories we circulate and become attached to. Additionally, we aim to empirically investigate the moral economies surrounding two key issues: public order and care. In the first case, we seek to understand how moral disputes over certain contentious objects (such as guns, property, and fences) shape conceptions of public order in cities marked by feelings of insecurity and the pervasive influence of digital platforms. In the second case, we aim to explore the rise of a new moral economy of care within social contexts such as education and politics, where the dangers of digitalization (hyperconnectivity, aggression and privacy concerns) come into tension with the symbolically desired moral goods associated with learning and deliberation. While these are broad research agendas, we are confident that focusing on the relationships between moral economy, narratives, and democracy will allow us to address them comprehensively.