Constitution-building in Africa

History has seen several waves of constitution-making since the start of 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, constitution-making and remaking have continued, particularly in Africa. In a number of the countries affected by the Arab Spring, constitutional arrangements remain unsettled and contested; Sudan and South Sudan are struggling to start constitution-making processes; and elsewhere in Africa including Somalia, The Gambia, Kenya, and Botswana, constitution-making is high on the political agenda.  This activity and struggles to bring constitution-making processes to successful conclusions has given rise to a range of new ideas about the nature and purpose of constitutions and constitution-making, constitutional solutions tailored to 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. Therefore, we are again offering a summer course on constitution building with a focus on Africa that engages with these problems, building on the experience of nine successful courses organized annually in the SUN framework from 2013.

At its core, the course intends to tackle complex social, 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 subject of the highest academic and practical relevance.