The Political Economy of Decentralised Federalism: An Anarchist Constitutional Design Towards Freedom and Equality

This thesis starts with the claim that the anarchist political economy of decentralised federalism is relevant to our contemporary political problems today, more than ever. Classical anarchists envisioned and described the type of political systems that can both emancipate people from the structures of political and economic oppression, and remove the coercive, centralised, punitive, and exploitative agency of the nation state. To date, research on anarchism has either focused on the history of anarchist thought, or anarchist currents in new social movements. This project will, however, develop groundbreaking research that explores anarchism as a constitutional politics. It will add to this historical and theoretical recovery, by specifying and evaluating, analytically, the alternative institutional design to the state that we find in that classical anarchist literature. The political economy of decentralised federalism enriches our political imaginations, and this project will contribute to mainstream political philosophy on the questions of devolution, asymmetric federalism, protection of minority rights, subsidiarity, and equality. It proposes to reconcile a libertarian socialist account of freedom and equality with non-statist constitutional design principles. This involves unpacking an anarchist political economy of decentralised federalism that speaks to the libertarian requirements for freedom and the republican defence of constitutional restraints on power while bringing to light an under-appreciated tradition of anti-statism in the history of political thought. By showing the real world applicability of this model, with examples drawn from a number of contemporary settings, this thesis will move us towards a more grounded, realist, and institutional design driven 'political political theory', which is motivated to rebuild more just, equal, and free institutions beyond the narrowly defined existing notions of private property and state.