The Social Experience of (In)justice. Revisiting Conceptions of Rights for Contemporary Latin America

Abstract

The article pretends to investigate the political implications of the relationship between democracy and rights in current Latin American context. This context is marked by a succession of constitutional reforms that seem to reconcile two trends usually in tension (constitutionalism and democracy) and to account for a new conception of citizenship for the region. They will be revisited, first, some juridical approaches around the constitutional reforms and their limits, and secondly, the approaches form social sciences around the "deficits" of the citizenship on the continent. Finally the text aims to rethink, following Claude Lefort’s definition of democracy as a form of society, the tension in the relationship between democracy and rights, beyond the fields of juridical and political science.