Since classical antiquity debates about tyranny, tyrannicide and preventing tyranny's re-emergence have permeated governance discourse. Yet within the literature on the global legal order, tyranny is missing. This book creates a taxonomy of tyranny and poses the question: could the global legal order be tyrannical? This taxonomy examines the benefits attached to tyrannical governance for the tyrant, considers how illegitimacy and fear establish tyranny, asks how rule by law, silence and beneficence aid in governing a tyranny. It outlines the modalities of tyranny: scale, imperialism, gender, and bureaucracy. Where it is determined that a tyranny exists, the book examines the extent of the right and duty to effect tyrannicide. As the global legal order gathers ever more power to itself, it becomes imperative to ask whether tyranny lurks at the global scale.

Constitutionalism offers a governance order a set of normative values including, amongst others, the rule of law, divisions of power and democratic legitimacy. These normative values regulate the relationship between constituent and constituted power holders. Such normative constitutional legal orders are commonplace in domestic systems but the global constitutionalisation debate seeks to identify a constitutional narrative beyond the state. This book considers the manner in which the global constitutionalisation debate has neglected constitutionalism within its proposals. It examines the role normative constitutionalism plays within a constitutionalisation process, and considers the use of community at both the domestic and global governance levels to identify the holders of constituent and constituted power within a constitutional order. In doing so this analysis offers an alternative narrative for global constitutionalisation based within normative constitutionalism.