Constitution Building in Africa: July 2018

Deadline: 15 February 2018

Registration is now open for the summer course on “Constitution Building in Africa” at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, on July 02-13, 2018. The course will feature distinguished African faculty including Omar Hamadi, Babacar Kante, Christina Murray, H. Kwasi Prempeh, Horace Adjolohoun, Gedion Hessebon, and Yash Ghai. More information is available [new link: https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/constitution-2018].

The course description follows: 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. 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 contemporary problems, and the proper role of international actors. The two-week research course intends to tackle complex societal, political and legal problems in constitution-building from an interdisciplinary perspective, informed by field experience. 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.

The course is designed to be a forum for exchange and mutual learning for practitioners of constitutional reform as well as for scholars of constitutional change. In previous courses participants included members of constitutional review commissions, civil servants, judges, civil society activists, officers from UN-missions and the AU and other intergovernmental organizations as well as academics with an interest in law, government and political science. Our participants and alumni have contributed to an ever growing network of professionals involved in the dynamics of constitution-building in Africa. This network includes the authors of the recently published book on “Public Participation in African Constitutionalism” (Routledge).

In cooperation with International IDEA, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Centre for Global Cooperation Research.