Annual Review of Constitution-Building: 2022

International IDEA’s Annual Review of Constitution-Building series provides a retrospective account of constitutional transitions around the world, the issues that drive them, and their implications for national and international politics.

2022 was another year of widespread constitutional instability. The main trend of constitutional change in recent years has been in unilateral, executive-driven processes, where reform is used to entrench the individual or group in power, in keeping with the broader trend of democratic backsliding, whereby governments have used the law as a weapon to diminish or destroy political competition.

The Annual Review of Constitution-Building studies issues which arose in a selection of these cases worldwide, with a view to both providing a record of recent constitution-building activity and distilling lessons on themes recurring in different processes.

Contents

Introduction
Sumit Bisarya

1. What lessons can Chile provide to its neighbours and beyond?
Kimana Zulueta-Fülscher

2. Global reverberations: Constitutional responses to the war in Ukraine
Sharon Pia Hickey

3. Republicanism, democratization and decolonization in the Commonwealth realms
W. Elliot Bulmer

4. Transitional provisions: Insights from constitution-building processes in 2022
Sumit Bisarya

5. Executive powers in flux: 2022 in Sri Lanka and Tunisia
Alexander Hudson

6. Refurbishing or replacing? Restoring constitutional order in post-coup transitions
Thibaut Noël

7. Winner-takes-all politics and opposition empowerment: Towards ‘Africanization’ of democracy?
Adem. K. Abebe