Latin American Regionalism: Constitutional Courts, Populism, and the Political Jurisprudence of Integration in Colombia and Ecuador

Juan Zahir Naranjo Cáceres

doi:10.25907/01110

This thesis examines how constitutional courts shape regional integration under conditions of populist governance, comparing the Constitutional Courts of Colombia and Ecuador. Both operate under constitutions that mandate regional integration as a state objective, and both claim the role of constitutional guardian charged with protecting the integrity and supremacy of their respective texts. Despite these structural similarities, the two courts have produced divergent integration outcomes, and that divergence sits at the centre of the analysis. The central argument is that regional integration in Colombia and Ecuador is continually constituted through their constitutional courts, which define the terms on which each state participates in regional arrangements and shape which forms of integration are constitutionally possible and which are foreclosed. Executives remain the primary agents of integration, negotiating and concluding the treaties and commitments that bind each state; the courts’ contribution is constitutive rather than executive, setting the constitutional conditions under which those commitments proceed. Constitutional structure, judicial resilience, and the character of populist politics explain why the two courts’ trajectories diverge. In Colombia, the Constitutional Court has developed a relatively stable, rights-conditional approach, grounding participation in democratic governance, human rights standards, and the protection of constitutional essentials. Doctrines of sustitución de la constitución, integral treaty review, and democratic conditionality have allowed it to condition Colombia’s engagement with regional organisations and trade agreements whilst sustaining a marked continuity of jurisprudence across contrasting populist administrations, from Álvaro Uribe’s right-wing, security-focused populism to Gustavo Petro’s left-wing, social-justice-oriented populism. The Ecuadorian Constitutional Court, by contrast, has produced a more oscillating, sovereignty- and ecology-conditional integration, shaped by the 2008 Constitution’s recognition of the rights of nature, plurinationalism, and categorical limits on investor-state arbitration. Its jurisprudence on Article 422’s prohibition on ceding sovereign jurisdiction, on free, prior and informed consent for Indigenous peoples, and on environmental protection in cases such as Los Cedros and Sinangoe has projected domestic constitutional standards into the regional sphere, even as its integration jurisprudence has shifted across the administrations of Rafael Correa, Lenín Moreno, Guillermo Lasso, and Daniel Noboa. The thesis explains this divergence through the three factors introduced above. Judicial resilience, understood as a court’s capacity to hold a consistent constitutional interpretation under executive pressure, turns on its institutional maturity, its citizen engagement mechanisms, and its positioning relative to powerful interests, whilst the constitutional origins each court inherits supply the structure within which that resilience develops. Populism is treated as a political logic through which leaders construct a frontier between “the people” and “the elite”, following the discursive, post-foundational approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; the framework shows how Colombian and Ecuadorian presidents cast their constitutional courts as either the embodiment of popular will or an obstacle to it. Drawing on Page strategic-defection theory, the thesis argues that Ecuador’s less consolidated institutional setting and weaker citizen-engagement mechanisms create stronger incentives for jurisprudential oscillation under shifting coalitions, whereas Colombia’s accumulated doctrinal capital and well-developed tutela jurisdiction have strengthened its Court’s capacity to sustain rights-conditional doctrines even when these constrain executive preferences. Methodologically, the thesis uses a most-similar-systems comparative design, pairing two Andean states that share a regional location, constitutionalised integration mandates, presidential systems, and exposure to both left- and right-wing populist governance, yet differ in the stability of their courts’ integration jurisprudence. It draws on qualitative jurisprudential analysis of the relevant decisions of the Colombian Court (1991–2026) and the Ecuadorian Court (2008–2025), coding each ruling by its integration position, constitutional basis, doctrinal mechanism, political context, and effect on the jurisprudential trajectory. A chronological reading traces how each court’s integration jurisprudence has developed across successive administrations, separating doctrinal continuity from shifts tied to changing political conditions. The thesis makes three contributions. Theoretically, it reformulates constitutional guardianship for the setting of regional integration, showing that courts at once enable and constrain integration and, more precisely, constitute the constitutional conditions under which it proceeds. Methodologically, it offers a replicable design for the comparative study of constitutional courts and regional integration whilst marking clearly what jurisprudential analysis can and cannot establish about practical outcomes. Empirically, it provides the first sustained comparison of the Colombian and Ecuadorian Constitutional Courts as constitutive actors in regional integration across the full populist spectrum, incorporating recent crises up to early 2026. Together, these show how domestic judicial institutions, as constitutionally embedded and politically situated actors, shape Latin American regionalism by defining, through legal reasoning, the permissible forms and limits of regional cooperation.

Latin American Regionalism: Constitutional Courts, Populism, and the Political Jurisprudence of Integration in Colombia and Ecuador

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