The anatomy of failure: The Sri Lankan Constitutional Reform Exercise 2014-18 in context

How does the way organized interests are included in constitution-drafting processes effect their capacity? Two recent examples of post-revolutionary constitution drafting in Egypt and Tunisia prov...

Organized Interests in Constitutional Assemblies: Egypt and Tunisia in Comparison

Breaking with a long tradition of political quietism, many Salafis in Tunisia and Egypt decided to found political parties and participate in competitive elections after the collapse of the regime. In doing so, they had to present a political program to voters, including policy proposals on economic issues. The article examines how Salafi parties dealt with economic policy-making and finds that they reluctantly engaged with it, offering contradictory and naive policies meant to pander to the electorate. Policy-making preferences and positions on economic issues are employed to look at the degree of party institutionalization Salafi parties have.

Beyond Quietism: Party Institutionalisation, Salafism, and the Economy

To what extent does societal resilience help to prevent governance breakdown? The EU’s southern neighbourhood has been troubled by multiple security risks in recent years. The security situation of...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13510347.2021.1928079

Preventing governance breakdown in the EU’s southern neighbourhood: fostering resilience to strengthen security perceptions

Transitional countries where authoritarian features have long been embedded in state institutions and policies face several challenges that limit their ability to meet the expectations of citizens regarding their rights. This article focuses on the development of human rights in transitional Egypt between 2011 and 2013. It illustrates how political actors perceive and critique the establishment of the legal and institutional framework regarding human rights protection, including constitution-making and transitional justice processes, providing evidence from insights obtained from semi-structured interviews with Egyptian political actors and the analysis of secondary sources. The article demonstrates that the uprisings in 2011 and subsequent developments during the SCAF and Morsi governments show the failure of political actors to protect Egyptians’ rights and meet the demands of the citizens with regard to social justice, economic opportunities, freedom, and dignity. It illustrates that weak or failing institutional capacities, an exclusive approach in establishing an institutional framework, lack of knowledge and experience concerning human rights protection, and the authoritarian features of state institutions strongly affected the promotion and protection of human rights in post-uprising Egypt.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642987.2021.1947807

Human rights challenges in post-uprising Egypt: political actors’ reflections on the years of 2011–2013

What determines the balance that democratizing constitutions strike between majority empowerment and individual rights? Some constitutions deliberately handicap state power to forestall threats to liberty, while others try to empower the government to hold the country together. We answer this question in the context of post-Arab Spring constitution-making, hypothesizing a U-shaped relationship between polarization among politically significant factions and net majority-empowering provisions in constitutions of new democracies, a relationship mediated by breadth of inclusion in the constitutional drafting process. We test the hypothesis through a controlled case comparison of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the three Arab-majority countries in which protestors successfully toppled authoritarian regimes.

/pdf/arab-spring-constitution-making-polarization-exclusion-and-ljwzc5lsxi.pdf

Arab Spring constitution-making: polarization, exclusion, and constraints

What determines the balance that democratizing constitutions strike between state capacity and individual rights? Some constitutions deliberately handicap state power to forestall threats to liberty, while others try to empower the government to hold the country together. We answer this question in the context of post-Arab Spring constitution-making, hypothesizing a U-shaped relationship between political polarization in the general public and net state capacity-building provisions in constitutions of new democracies. We test the hypothesis through a controlled case comparison of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the three Arab-majority countries in which protestors successfully toppled authoritarian regimes.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2518648_code538619.pdf?abstractid=2518648&mirid=4

Ester Cross

Papers

Arab Spring constitution-making: polarization, exclusion, and constraints

Arab Spring Constitution-Making: Polarization and State Building