Re-imagining the state in Africa: a case of unfinished business

From Zimbabwe to Kenya, from Guinea Bissau and now to the Ivory Coast, the African continent is increasingly riddled with incidents of violent conflict associated with periods of democratic transition. Indeed, the past two decades have proven critical in the evolution of African statehood, during which age-old strategies of state control have broken down, giving rise to a wealth of debates over the ‘failure’ of the post-colonial African state. This phenomenon has also led to attempts to revise and expand theories and concepts of statehood, catalysing a search for more empirically viable understandings of statehood than those devised by European colonisers. Much of this is witnessed in the rise of constitutions framed following conflict whereby the benefits of a constitution as a key element of post-conflict peace building are hinged on its ability to reconcile groups, to address intolerable grievances and to prevent further polarisation and conflict. Yet Africa’s ‘constitutional moment’ has gone relatively unnoticed, lying largely outside the mainstream of contemporary international relations discourse. This study aims to foreground the role of constitution making and reconfigure it within the historical processes of a people in struggle for a more just and inclusive political order.