Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: Global Comparative Perspectives

Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam

Adjunct Professor and PhD Fellow, Maurer School of Law Center for Constitutional Democracy, Indiana University Bloomington.

Periods of intense political upheaval create extraordinary opportunities for constitutional renewal while simultaneously exposing constitution-builders to extraordinary uncertainty. Sometimes, an established regime collapses and an entirely new constitutional order must be constructed. At other times, mass protests and popular mobilization compel incumbent rulers to undertake constitutional reforms while the underlying regime survives. Elsewhere, political upheaval gives way to prolonged transition, armed conflict, state fragmentation, or renewed authoritarianism. The constitutional transformations that followed the Arab Spring encompassed all these possibilities. What they shared was not revolution in any strict sense, but a regional crisis of political authority that placed existing constitutional arrangements under extraordinary pressure and made constitutional change a central terrain of political contestation. Comparative constitutional scholarship has long examined these tensions, but often through regional lenses: Western European liberal constitutionalism, post-communist Central and Eastern European constitutionalism, constitutional reconstruction in Latin America, and post-conflict constitution-building in Africa. The constitutional consequences of the Arab Spring have frequently been treated as distinct stories rather than manifestations of a common constitutional problem.

Francesco Biagi’s Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: A Comparative Perspective represents an important contribution to that broader inquiry. The book is the product of more than a decade of sustained scholarly and practical engagement with constitution-building across the Arab world. Alongside his academic work, Biagi has participated in constitution-building and rule-of-law projects in Jordan, Palestine, and Morocco through the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law and other institutions. That combination of comparative constitutional analysis and first-hand practical experience gives the book a perspective that is at once institutional, doctrinal, and attentive to the political conditions under which constitutions are made and implemented.

Biagi examines the constitutional trajectories of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan following the uprisings of 2011. Their significance lies precisely in the fact that they did not follow a single trajectory. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, popular mobilization contributed to the removal of longstanding rulers and opened the possibility of far-reaching political transformation, although with dramatically different consequences. In Morocco and Jordan, by contrast, ruling institutions survived and constitutional reform formed part of the response to protests and demands for political change. Algeria followed yet another trajectory, while Syria descended into prolonged conflict. The Arab Spring therefore did not generate a uniform wave of revolutions followed by constitution-making. It produced a spectrum ranging from constitutional replacement and attempted democratic refoundation to pre-emptive constitutional reform, authoritarian adaptation, and state breakdown. The post-2011 Arab world consequently offers a particularly revealing setting in which to study the relationship between political upheaval and constitutional transformation.

One of the book’s principal contributions is its insistence that constitution-building is a multidimensional enterprise rather than merely the drafting of constitutional texts. Biagi organizes his analysis around the processes through which constitutions are written or reformed, the institutional and normative choices embodied in constitutional texts, and the mechanisms through which constitutions are interpreted, enforced, and translated into practice. Constitutions must therefore be evaluated not only according to how they are made or what they proclaim, but also according to whether they effectively structure political power. His comparative analysis accordingly ranges across systems of government and separation of powers, constitutional justice, religion and state, citizenship, women’s rights, and the rights of non-Muslims.

Biagi places the post-Arab Spring experience within a broader debate about the character of constitution-making during periods of extraordinary political change. Drawing on Bruce Ackerman’s distinction between ordinary and constitutional politics, he observes that Arab constitution-makers frequently adopted a “short-term, partisan perspective,” acting as though they were engaged in “ordinary politics” rather than “constitutional politics.” He consequently concludes that most post-Arab Spring constitution-making could hardly be regarded as a “genuine exercise of higher lawmaking.”

Running through the book are several tensions that extend well beyond the Middle East and North Africa. One concerns competing conceptions of the constitution itself. Biagi distinguishes constitutions that function primarily as instruments for organizing government from constitutions understood as charters of constitutional values. In authoritarian and hybrid regimes, constitutional texts may organize and legitimize political authority while leaving meaningful checks and balances, judicial independence, and rights protection subordinate to executive control. By contrast, constitutions conceived as charters of values seek to limit power through constitutional supremacy, separation of powers, and enforceable rights. Many post-2011 constitutions adopted the language of dignity, pluralism, rights, and democracy without fundamentally altering the structures through which political authority was exercised. The text changed more readily than the distribution of power.

A related tension concerns the integrative function of constitutions in divided societies. Constitutions adopted or reformed amid political upheaval often aspire to redefine the political community or respond to demands for greater recognition, yet constitutional integration remains incomplete where politically salient communities are denied meaningful acknowledgment. Morocco and Algeria, for example, constitutionally recognized Tamazight alongside Arabic, while other constitutional projects have left significant ethnic or religious communities largely absent from the constitutional imagination. Constitutional silence can therefore be as consequential as constitutional recognition.

Biagi also emphasizes the persistent divergence between the written and operative constitution. Alongside formal constitutional rules may exist an informal order composed of security institutions, political networks, emergency practices, and entrenched distributions of authority that exercise constitutional power without corresponding constitutional accountability. Rights may be guaranteed while coercive institutions remain insulated from effective control. The familiar distinction between “law in the books” and “law in action” thus acquires a constitutional analogue. Roberto Gargarella’s metaphor of the constitutional “engine room” is particularly useful here: constitutions may enlarge catalogues of rights while leaving largely untouched the institutional architecture through which power is actually exercised.

These dynamics are especially visible in Biagi’s treatment of constitutional courts. Constitutional adjudication cannot be assessed independently of the political settlement in which courts operate. Courts may serve as guardians of constitutional supremacy, but they may also stabilize existing distributions of authority. Formal jurisdiction, appointment rules, and rights guarantees matter, but their practical significance depends on whether the surrounding constitutional order permits institutions to exercise meaningful independence. Tunisia, by contrast, demonstrates another form of fragility: an ambitious democratic constitutional design may itself remain vulnerable when the institutions necessary to sustain it are never consolidated. The failure to establish the Constitutional Court contemplated by the 2014 Constitution became especially consequential in July 2021, when President Kais Saied dismissed the prime minister, suspended parliament, and assumed emergency powers without the Constitutional Court capable of adjudicating the constitutionality of those measures.

It is precisely the broader comparative significance of these problems that motivates this symposium. Rather than offering conventional book reviews, the contributions use Biagi’s work as a point of departure for a wider inquiry into constitution-building across the different forms of political disruption and transformation associated with the Arab Spring and comparable experiences elsewhere. Regime collapse is one context, but it is not the only one. Constitutional change may also emerge from mass protest, negotiated transition, pre-emptive reform by incumbent regimes, military-civilian bargaining, or efforts to reconstruct political authority following conflict. Questions of sequencing, constituent authority, executive power, military dominance, judicial review, external assistance, constitutional identity, and the gap between constitutional promise and constitutional practice recur across these different settings.

The contributions extend, test, and in some instances challenge Biagi’s framework along several dimensions. Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi asks whether the rush to draft permanent constitutions may itself contribute to democratic failure. Drawing on Tunisia and Egypt, the literature on premature elections, and his experience as principal legal drafter of Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law, he argues for a prior “constitutional infrastructure”: peace, political equilibrium, trust, and a modus vivendi among newly empowered political actors before they bind themselves to permanent arrangements. Johannes Socher shifts the lens to external constitutional assistance in Africa. Using German engagement as his principal point of reference, he distinguishes forms and stages of external support and assesses their effectiveness through national ownership, quality, added value, and local reception, while asking when outsiders should participate in so sovereign a process at all. Nawel Lasledj examines Algeria’s constitutional recognition of Tamazight as a case in which symbolic integration coexisted with crisis-driven constitutional engineering aimed at stabilizing the political order. Tracing Tamazight from national-language status in 2002 to official status in 2016 and entrenched protection in 2020, she argues that reform responded both to a longer Amazigh struggle and to pressures unleashed by the Arab Spring. Yet uneven implementation, especially in education and institutional support, reveals the limits of formal recognition and the gap between constitutional accommodation and constitutional practice.

Tamara El Khoury turns to constitutional courts, arguing that whether they constrain or legitimate power depends upon the wider constitution-building process and political settlement. Her comparison of Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and selected African experiences shows how formal judicial empowerment may coexist with executive dominance, while democratic design may fail when institutions cannot be consolidated. Mohamed Arafa, focusing on Egypt, develops Biagi’s account through the idea of “constitutional dissonance”: formal constitutional innovation coexisting with substantial continuity in underlying structures of power. He argues that successive post-2011 constitutions accommodated popular demands textually while preserving entrenched military, executive, and bureaucratic authority. His analysis of the Supreme Constitutional Court further shows how judicial review may mediate constitutional conflict yet also become implicated in authoritarian adaptation when judicial independence is weakened. Sami Abdelhalim Saeed extends Biagi’s analysis to Sudan’s post-2018 transition, describing the 2019 Constitutional Charter as a “constitutional trap” that preserved military autonomy, blurred executive authority, lacked effective legislative and judicial checks, and failed to prevent the 2021 coup. Collectively, the essays shift attention from drafting alone to the political settlements, institutional environments, external interventions, and coercive structures that determine whether formal constitutional change produces an effective constitutional order.

The symposium therefore approaches constitution-building as both a legal and a political process. Constitutional change does not happen on an institutional tabula rasa. Reformers inherit militaries, bureaucracies, courts, monarchies, political parties, social cleavages, informal networks, and international relationships from the order they seek either to replace or to transform. Nor can successful constitution-building be measured simply by the enactment of a new text. The deeper question is whether constitutions become authoritative enough to channel conflict, distribute and constrain power, and sustain democratic institutions.

This comparative perspective also highlights the increasingly transnational character of contemporary constitution-building. Constitutional ideas, institutional models, technical expertise, and constitutional advisers circulate readily across jurisdictions. That circulation can expand the range of available constitutional choices, but it also raises questions of ownership, transplantation, legitimacy, and the relationship between international expertise and domestic political settlement.

The publication of this symposium comes at a moment when constitutional change remains central to constitutional politics in numerous jurisdictions. Mass protest, democratic transition, authoritarian adaptation, constitutional replacement, military intervention, and post-conflict reconstruction continue to raise fundamental questions about constituent authority, constitutional legitimacy, institutional design, and democratic resilience. The experiences examined by Biagi and by the contributors are therefore not merely historical episodes. They speak directly to contemporary debates over whether constitutional design can translate democratic aspirations into an enduring framework for constitutional government.

It is fitting that Professor Biagi will conclude the symposium by tying the contributions together around drafting, constitutional content, and enforcement. He argues that durable constitution-building must transcend short-term partisan politics, disperse power, and establish institutions capable of translating constitutional promises into practice—renewing the fundamental question of when political contestation can produce democratic constitutional arrangements that structure and sustain change.

Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam is Adjunct Professor and PhD Fellow, Maurer School of Law Center for Constitutional Democracy, Indiana University Bloomington

Suggested Citation; Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam, ‘Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: Global Comparative Perspectives’ IACL-AIDC Blog (22 September 2026) Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: Global Comparative Perspectives