The #SouthernArchives of Comparative Constitutional Law: Why We Tweet From the Archive of World Comparative Law

Maxim Bönnemann & Philipp Dann

Michigan Law School & Humboldt University

World Comparative Law, a long-time collaboration partner of the IACL blog, opens its decades-old archive on Twitter. Since 1968, scholars have written about state formation, postcolonial justice, and constitutional and administrative law in the Global South in our journal. Many of these voices have been forgotten, many marginalised. We bring back some of these voices in short threads on Twitter. For while contemporary comparative constitutional law is increasingly pluralising, the history of the discipline is still dominated by the Global North. 

Introduction

In 1986, Kenyan jurist JB Ojwang posed a question in the journal World Comparative Law that continues to preoccupy comparative constitutional studies up until today. Are constitutional concepts and ideas of Western origin useful as an analytical lens through which to study constitutions and institutions in the Global South? Ojwang had a very concrete reason for his question. In 1982, a coup attempt in Kenya failed and a commission of three judges was to investigate what role the Minister for Constitutional Affairs played in the attempt. Ojwang took the report as an opportunity to shed light on the relationship between the executive and the legislature in Kenya - and found numerous weaknesses in Kenyan parliamentarianism that made parliament vulnerable to executive overreach. Solutions were needed, but those solutions also must fit. For that the mechanisms for checks on executive power in Kenya were "entirely outside the traditional Western scheme of parliamentary government". 

Ojwang's article can be read as a double intervention. On the one hand, it is an attempt to stabilise domestic political institutions through legal instruments. At the same time, however, the article is a contribution to a global debate in comparative constitutional law. Ojwang wrote three articles for World Comparative Law in the 1980s. The leitmotif that runs through the articles is that the historical lines of development, political contexts and socio-economic conditions in states of the Global South are different from those in the North – while the globally circulating grammar, terms and concepts of comparative constitutionalism are deeply Western impregnated.

Silenced Voices and Dormant Knowledge

Ojwang was not alone in his intervention. With decolonisation, the number of new, independent states multiplied. And with them, the number of new questions about state formation and political order, international law and global redistribution, and not least about the everyday routines of the administrative state in the Global South exploded. Like Ojwang, hundreds of scholars in the Global South participated in enriching constitutional and international law with a Southern perspective. The remeasurement of constitutional law was continental in scale, covering dozens of states, and affecting the lives of people in "most of the world”. 

And yet, if we look back from today’s perspective, most of these voices remain unheard in the global constitutional law debates . While today's scholarship in comparative constitutionalism has noticeably pluralised, the history of comparative constitutionalism is still characterised by massive epistemic injustice. Which voices are heard and which are not, who is taken seriously and who is silenced, has been decided for decades (and still today) by an infrastructure of global knowledge production that is predominantly located in the Global North - and which all too often reproduced the epistemic violence of colonialism. Countless amounts of knowledge lie dormant in forgotten archives, archived journals and books published only in very small editions outside the large flagship publishers.

Two Directions of the Southern Turn 

The Southern Turn in comparative constitutional law must therefore point in two temporal directions - to the future, but also to the past. This small project is about the latter dimension. We want to open up the archive of World Comparative Law and bring themes, voices and motifs from the past into Twitter timelines. #SouthernArchives is not a research project, but rather a gentle reminder: that many seemingly new issues being discussed today have been discussed before; that constitutional comparison was not just a matter for the Global North; that constitutional comparison was also an arena of competing visions of postcolonial justice.

Beyond the Grand Narratives

Of course, the World Comparative Law archive is only one piece of the puzzle in this endeavour. But it is not a small piece. A distinctive feature of World Comparative Law is that it made it its mission as early as 1968 to be an organ for law and politics in the Global South. It was precisely that spirit of international awakening, decolonisation and international cooperation that led to the founding of the journal. With telephone and typewriter, the journal acquired contributions from Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited them in Hamburg and published them four times a year. In this way, an archive has grown over the decades; an archive of Southern Constitutionalism. An archive in which we find voices and ideas beyond the grand narratives of the Global North. 

An Invitation to Engage

Pluralising our knowledge production is a complex, lengthy, and contested endeavour. It involves big questions of global hierarchies in the university and publishing sectors, but also small questions of daily routines: Who do we cite? Which journals and books make it into our essays? And why do certain ideas only become popular when they are voiced by certain people in certain journals and with certain publishers? With #SouthernArchives, our journal would like to make a small contribution to the pluralisation of knowledge, and perhaps in a rather unusual place: in the Twitter feed of legal academia. Our idea is to present an article from our archive once a week - as a short thread, and as a brief insight into the rich constitutional law discussions in the Global South. But #SouthernArchives is also an invitation to engage. If you have a story to tell about biographies, movements, or marginalised ideas from the history of Southern Constitutionalism, we would be happy to read it under the hashtag #SouthernArchives and share it on Twitter. Because it is high time to put together the puzzle pieces of the constitutional history of the Global South - piece by piece.

You can find the Twitter account of World Comparative Law here. 

Maxim Bönnemann is a research fellow at Humboldt University and the Kassel Institute for Sustainability. He is an International and Comparative Law Research Scholar at Michigan Law School for the academic term 2023 - 2024.

Philipp Dann is professor of public law and comparative law at Humboldt University Berlin.

Suggested citation: Maxim Bönnemann and Philipp Dann, ‘The #SouthernArchives of Comparative Constitutional Law: Why We Tweet From the Archive of World Comparative Law’ IACL-AIDC Blog (27 June 2023) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2023-posts/2023/6/27/the-southernarchives-of-comparative-constitutional-law-why-we-tweet-from-the-archive-of-world-comparative-law.