History has seen several waves of constitution-building in the 20th century with an unparalleled boom starting in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And while experts recently announced the end of this boom in new constitutions after the Cold War, the world is witnessing another wave of constitution-building, this time predominately in Africa. Quite prominent have been the dynamics in the Maghreb as a result of the Arab spring that have recently extended to Algeria and Sudan. Less visible, but also very vivid are the processes in Sub-Saharan Africa (1), recently in Central African Republic, Kenya, Zimbabwe, presently in Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, Somalia, Mali, Liberia and prospectively in Botswana, Nigeria, and other countries. This burst of activity has given rise to a range of new ideas about the nature and purpose of constitutions and constitution-making, constitutional solutions to genuine local problems, the proper role of international and local actors in the constitution-building process as well as the value of having a dedicated implementation process for a newly adopted constitution. (2)
At its heart the proposed course intends to tackle complex societal, political and legal problems in constitution-building from an interdisciplinary perspective, informed by field experience. In order to understand and contextualize practitioners’ experiences, we seek to combine different disciplines (mostly comparative law and political science) and perspectives (comparative governmental systems; electoral systems; decentralization; human rights; comparative constitutional law; good governance; etc) to offer new insights on a classic subject of the highest academic and practical relevance.
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