Constitutions are social and historical artefacts that take part in the government of humans. Based on a comparison of how contemporary ‘global’ and historical ‘local’ constitutional documents establish power relations between ‘humans’ and their ‘government’, this article suggests that both types of documents involve different constitutive logics. Global constitutional documents create a ‘new normativity’ – a reversed constitution – that turns the historical relationship between pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué on its head. Such documents shift the primary responsibility for human rights from governments to humans. Research in the academic field of global constitutionalism omits this constitutional reconfiguration. By offering a more historically sensitive and reflexive account of constitutionalization, the field of global constitutionalism can realize an as yet unexplored critical potential.

Many recent arguments for trans-state and global democracy would offer broad leeway on constitutionalized right standards to states, and few formal mechanisms for individuals to challenge domestic rights rejections beyond the state. Such a stance, it is shown here, tends to be rooted in implicit presumptions of domestic consensus. Challenges are offered to this and related presumptions in accounts of cosmopolitan democracy, as well as global variants of liberal nationalism and political liberalism. An alternative, primarily instrumental approach to trans-state and global democracy is detailed. It would give emphasis to ways in which formal suprastate participation, complemented by challenge mechanisms for individuals, could play a crucial role in helping to strengthen individual rights protections within states. The case for adopting such an approach is reinforced through attention to the efforts of a persistent domestic democratic minority – Dalits in India – to reach out to the global human rights regime for help in pressuring their own state to better protect rights against exclusion and subjugation.