Lecture Series (Spring 2015): Constitutional Reform and Social Change in Asia and the Middle East (original) (raw)

Regimes Reinventing Themselves Constitutional Development in the Arab World

abstract: In the Arab world, most constitutional documents have been promulgated less by the nation assembled than by existing regimes seeking tools to enable them to face domestic and international challenges. Constitutions have been issued to address a varying range of concerns: international , domestic and internal to the state itself. This article traces the enabling aspects of Arab constitutions over the past century and a half, concentrating on the very recent past. In some ways, the past couple of decades have seen a definite (if limited) upsurge of interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world. Recent constitutional innovations have stressed regularization of authority, bounded democracy and a modest increase in the autonomy of some constitutional structures (especially courts and parliaments). Yet that change should not obscure an underlying continuity. For while the Arab world has joined the global trend toward greater interest in constitutional structures, the changes of the past few decades have not reversed the patterns of the past: constitutions remain politically enabling documents. keywords: Arab world ✦ constitutionalism ✦ judicial review ✦ parliamentarism Constitutionalism and constitution-writing have been dominated for the past two centuries by metaphors of collective self-definition: a constitution is an attempt by a political community to express the fundamental rules and values of political life. The strongest institutional expression of such metaphors is the constituent assembly: a body of elected representatives , defining or redefining the nation. The United States and France helped give birth to this idealized image of constitutional composition. Constitutional politics is to transcend normal politics; indeed, such politics

The Impact of Western Constitutionalism on Constitutional Development in Muslim States

The Islamic world has spent centuries forming its legal structures from which its various concepts of a constitution and the constitutional process have been derived. Constitutional law, one of the most significant legal concepts, is affected by social and political developments. The constitutional structure of Muslim states, especially those of the Gulf States, differs considerably from those of the non-Gulf states. For example Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) all have recognizably modern written constitutions, whereas Saudi Arabia and Oman have no written constitution at all. In these latter states, the rulers are guided principally by the Shari‗ah. This paper analyzes the constitutional development of Muslim states in two main frameworks: the historical backdrops of their constitutional processes (focusing on the structure of their current constitutions) and that of the Ottoman Empire (giving special attention to its successor: the secular Republic of Turkey).

Constitutional transitions in the Middle East: Introduction

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2013

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is witnessing the greatest degree of political transformation and regime change in a generation—the Arab Awakening. The causes of these revolutions are rooted in corruption, a lack of economic opportunity, and most fundamentally, authoritarianism. What is striking is that constitutional transitions of various forms have accompanied regime change in every case—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. New constitutional beginnings are demanded not only as a necessary means to break from a discredited past; they are viewed, perhaps unrealistically, as being necessary for achieving progress in economic and social reform. Indeed, equating constitutional reform with progress has become so commonplace that two non-transitioning states, Morocco and Jordan, have enacted a set of comprehensive constitutional amendments to preempt popular uprisings. Conversely, it is feared that erring in constitutional design will condemn the region to repeat the mistakes of the past, and may open the door to the establishment of Islamic states that may be authoritarian under a new guise, and which could have little respect for human rights, religious minorities or the rule of law. Debates over constitutional design are now at the very heart of political life.

Arab constitutionalism and the formalism of authoritarian constitutionalism

forthcoming in: Helena Alvar Garcia and Gunter Frankenberg, "Authoritarian constitutionalism: analysis and critique", 2019

This chapter challenges different manifestations of a “formalist” approach to constitutional theory. The formalist approach deploys several labels and distinctions (constitutions without constitutionalism, authoritarian, ideological, instrumentalist, and temporary) that question the constitutional legitimacy of non-North American and non-Western European constitutions because these are considered as merely political instruments lacking the supremacy and rigidity of higher law. This approach is formalist in two senses: it is overly focused on the text (or constitutional form), and it assumes that abstract categories determine the constitutional content or practice. Ottoman and Arab constitution-making, the subject of this chapter, illustrate that this formalist approach is deficient because it is impervious to constitutional and political practice. As such, and while “ideological” is often used in the “positive sense” to convey a system of ideas, it has negative “ideological” effects because it juxtaposes these constitutions to an idealised version of liberal constitutions (understood as “normative”, supra-political constitutions) and discounts constitutional experiences that fall outside the orbit of North America and Europe. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section presents the general argument by focusing on the notion of “constitutions without constitutionalism”. The second section zeros in on the notion of “authoritarian constitutionalism” and the third and fourth sections scrutinize its accompanying sub-categories “ideological”, “instrumental”, and “temporary” constitutions. It is argued that these categories are neither analytically illuminating nor descriptively informative. Arab constitutions served different purposes, included inconsistencies, and provided a space for political struggle and contestation. Thus, these abstract categories foreclose a nuanced and properly contextualized analysis of post-colonial constitutional orders. The final section, the Conclusion, elaborates on the framing effects of these abstract categories.

Constitutionalism in the Middle East

POLITIKA, 2017

Online encyclopedia POLITIKA, 2017. Summary: The intellectual and political history of the Middle East has been marked by constitutionalism since the nineteenth century. It was the principal movement contributing to the spread of modern political values associated with democracy, but also led to the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism which developed in a political order no longer regulated by the principles of monarchic and divine legitimacy. The Iranian and Ottoman Revolutions (1906 and 1908 respectively) transformed constitutionalism into a reality for most of the Middle East, bequeathing a legacy of major significance to the twentieth century.