From administrative to constitutional bodies – The fourth branch of government: Towards the constitutionalization of independent specialized national institutions in Cameroon

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-503
Author(s):  
Justin Ngambu Wanki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Current System ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
National Institutions

In this article, I discuss the need to constitutionalize independent national institutions in Cameroon. Even though a considerable number of these institutions exist in Cameroon, for more practical reasons this study specifically delves into the analysis of National Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms (NCHRF) and Elections Cameroon (ELECAM). The existence of these institutions as administrative institutions has opened the leeway for the executive to manipulate them for ulterior motives. As a result, these institutions have failed to fulfil their mandate in terms of post-Cold War constitutionalism requirements intended to restrain the excessive executive power, reminiscent of that exercised by the colonial state. In the aftermath of colonialism, post-colonial state reconstruction aims at bringing about transformative constitutionalism where these independent institutions support and promote constitutional democracy in Cameroon and enforce accountable governance. This article reveals that amending the constitution to entrench these institutions is not enough to guarantee the independence and the transformative mandate that these institutions are vested with. This shortcoming is informed by the flawed nature of the present constitution which is an aged-old ideological document. The existence of this blight calls for the engagement of a new constitution-making process that systematically eradicates the influence of elites. The current system is controlled by ‘strongmen’ due to lack of separation of powers, the resultant constitution should therefore clearly break with this present culture. Given that South Africa was one of the pioneer and unique jurisdictions in the world to entrench these group of institutions genuinely supporting constitutional democracy in chapter 9 of its constitution, I have referred to their constitutional experience to import what practical measures are available not just to enable the constitutionalization of these institutions in Cameroon, but equally their effective implementation. A proposal for the provision of additional post-Cold War constitutional features in the new constitutional design has been advanced in support of strengthening the constitutionalization ambition, without which this design would be nothing more than a dead letter or would fail to achieve its intended purpose.

India–Myanmar Relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Gaurav Kumar Jha ◽  
Amrita Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
World Order ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Market Interdependence

Despite long historical ties, post-colonial relations between India and Myanmar have fluctuated between magnanimity and mistrust. While India often stood for high moral grounds and promotion of democracy, it did so at the cost of losing Myanmar to China. This affected both India and Myanmar adversely: while New Delhi’s economic, energy and security interests were hurt, isolated Yangon became more China-dependent. However, since the early 1990s, domestic developments in Myanmar and post-Cold War structural changes in the world order necessitated conditions for cooperation and mutual gains. It appears that blatant domestic suppression in, and international seclusion of, Myanmar is not desirable. Having witnessed two eras of magnanimity and mistrust, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Myanmar in 2012 heralds a prospective era of market interdependence while opening Pandora’s box: can India get a better share of Myanmar’s commercial possibilities without compromising its core interests in promoting democracy, development and diaspora protection?

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

scholarly journals On Recent Developments in the New Historiography of (Neo)Liberalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
Iain Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The End Of History

Over the last twenty years or so several new waves of research on the history of liberalism have emerged. The novelty of this should not be exaggerated as broad scholarly interest in liberalism has in fact been increasing at a remarkable rate since the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is clear that the historiography of liberalism has broken much new ground since around the turn of the century. This has been driven partly by the influence of larger developments in the humanities and social sciences. The global and post-colonial turns, for instance, have helped to reshape the historiography of liberalism by provoking debates over the extent of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, while also drawing attention to the contribution of theorists from the global south. But even much of this ‘normal’ innovation has been driven at least indirectly by a growing sense that liberalism is in crisis. The War on Terror, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the global rise of populist authoritarianism are the obvious staging posts in liberalism's journey from post-Cold War triumphalism to contemporary fears for its imminent demise. And it is not a coincidence that the end of the end of history has seen the beginning of a new historiography of liberalism. Since the early 2000s the emergence of new sub-fields like the histories of ‘Cold War liberalism’, human rights and neoliberalism can all be seen in different ways as responding to liberalism's unfolding crisis.

Postwar Politics in O Herói and Kangamba

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lanie Millar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Post War ◽  
Effects Of War

The two films O herói [The Hero] (Angola, 2005) and Kangamba (Cuba, 2008) examine the inheritances reconsider the inheritances of Angola’s post-colonial history and Cuba’s most involved internationalist project in Angola from very different perspectives. This article proposes an analysis of how each of the two films cites the revolutionary impulse of the early war years in the context of the post-Cold War confrontation with the global circulation of cultural and economic capital. The popular war epic Kangamba, an example of what historian Rafael Rojas identifies as a post-Cold War restorative impulse that remembers the early years of Cuban revolutionary orthodoxy as stable and purposeful, strikes a discordant contrast with other more critical accounts of the war, which O herói represents through the story of an Angolan ex-soldier, a former prostitute and a presumed orphan struggling to re-integrate into civilian society. Considering the two films together will expose Kangamba’s performance of a defiant gesture toward a contemporary cultural climate increasingly divided in its collective memories of the war while O herói’s engagement with the post-war aesthetics of disillusionment presents effects of war on the human landscape unacknowledged in Kangamba’s nostalgic look back to the height of revolutionary utopian idealism, and suggests that the damage done to the national Angolan fractures and distances it from notions of national or global solidarity.

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