The Global History of Political Autonomy: Constituent Authority as an Explanandum and the Design of a Comparative-Historical Research Programme

The Global History of Political Autonomy (GHPA) establishes collective constituent political autonomy as a distinct object of global comparative-historical investigation: the historically effective authority through which collectivities constitute political actors, determine the conditions of binding authorization, and preserve, lose, or recover competence to revise those conditions. The article develops four interconnected questions concerning the constitutive object, historical collective actor, effective constituent power, and authority over authorization. It shows how these relationships can be reconstructed without equating autonomy with institutional form, participation, or recognition granted by an external authority. A register of 184 candidate entries provides a developing field of inquiry rather than a validated global census. Investigations of Athens and Cherán demonstrate distinct source-critical operations: the Athenian sequence separates documented legislative acts from the historical constitution of lawmaking competence, while Cherán discloses the formation of communal political authority, contested boundaries of collective agency, and the limited jurisdictional effects of constitutional recognition. Together they show how constituent relationships become historically comparable without erasing the differences among their sources. Independently testable causal hypotheses arise from this reconstructed field; their confirmation is not presupposed. The resulting research architecture makes the changing distribution of constituent authority a primary relation for global historical comparison.