Annual Review of Constitution-Building: 2020

International IDEA’s Annual Review of Constitution-Building Processes: 2020 provides a retrospective account of constitutional reform processes around the world and from a comparative perspective, and their implications for national and international politics. This eighth edition covers events in 2020 and includes chapters on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and emergency legal frameworks on constitutionalism and constitution-building worldwide; the impact of the pandemic on attempted executive aggrandizement in Central African Republic, Hungary and Sri Lanka; the impact of the pandemic on peace- and constitution-building processes in Libya, Syria and Yemen; gender equality in constitution-building and peace processes, with a particular focus on Chile and Zimbabwe; constitutional amendments to enhance the recognition of customary law in Samoa and Tonga; and the establishment, functioning and outputs of the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate. Writing at the mid-way point between the instant reactions of the blogosphere and academic analyses that follow several years later, the authors provide accounts of ongoing political transitions, the major constitutional issues they give rise to, and the implications of these processes for democracy, the rule of law and peace.

Feminist multimodality—A retrospective account of an exhibition on speculative urbanism

This essay offers a retrospective account of a multimodal public exhibit at the end of a multi-year research project on speculative urbanism. While the registers of speculation are invariably forward-looking, our research presented us with the central place of memory as a frame through which urban residents in Bengaluru, India, negotiate their present and imagine the possibilities of the future. This essay examines four ways in which we created space for memory in our exhibit, understanding our approach as situating an archive-optic, drawing on approaches of critical fabulation, object perception, and submerged perspectives. I suggest that these forms of engagement are multimodal and that they offer feminist and decolonial ways to unmaster linear narratives and situate our research affectively.

A Retrospective Account of Seminal Research by H. M. Zbib

Throughout his career, Zbib was innovative, originating models in seminal papers that anticipated areas of subsequent increased interest. These include strain-gradient plasticity, discrete dislocation dynamics, multiscale modeling, Arrays of Somigliana ring dislocations, and nanoscale plasticity. We comment here on these aspects of his work. Many of the papers in this volume represent applications of these ideas.

Annual Review of Constitution-Building: 2019

International IDEA’s Annual Review of Constitution-Building provides a retrospective account of constitutional transitions around the world, the issues that drive them, and their implications for national and international politics. This seventh edition covers events in 2019. Because this year marks the end of a decade, the first chapter summarizes a series of discussions International IDEA held with international experts and scholars throughout the year on the evolution of constitution-building over the past 10 years. The edition also includes chapters on challenges with sustaining constitutional pacts in Guinea and Zimbabwe; public participation in constitutional reform processes in The Gambia and Mongolia; constitutional change and subnational governance arrangements in Tobago and the Autonomous Region of Bangsamoro; the complexities of federal systems and negotiations on federal state structures in Myanmar and South Sudan; and the drawing (and redrawing) of the federal map in South Sudan and India. Writing at the mid-way point between the instant reactions of the blogosphere and academic analyses that follow several years later, the authors provide accounts of ongoing political transitions, the major constitutional issues they give rise to, and the implications of these processes for democracy, the rule of law and peace.

History of the In-Between: World Literature and the Contemporary African Novel

The African novel has had an uneasy relationship with world literature, but a way to locate the historical novel in world literature lies in the emphatic turn of African fiction to the historical novel. Positing a temporality of a decolonization not yet achieved, the contemporary African novel returns to the particulars of national histories to explain change that has remained unacknowledged or misrepresented for political reasons. It grapples with the writing of history as a conscious process of what Edward W. Said describes as “textualization”: a narration that stresses voice and style in order to convey the particularity of historical circumstance, not as reportage but as lived experience. The world making of world literature comes into play as historical becoming revealed in the retrospective account conscious of the conditions of its own telling.

Historicizing the comparative survey of freedom: tracing the social trajectory of an influential indicator

ArgumentThe Comparative Survey of Freedom, first published by Freedom House in 1973, is now the most widely used indicator of democracy by both academics and the U.S. government alike. However, literature examining the Survey’s origins is virtually nonexistent. In this article, I use archival records to challenge Freedom House’s retrospective account of the indicator’s creation. Rather than the outcome of a scientific methodology by multiple social scientists, the Survey was produced by a single political scientist, Raymond Gastil, according to his own hunches and impressions. How, then, did this indicator rise to such prominence? I argue that the Survey’s notoriety can be attributed to its early promotion in both political science and American foreign policy decision-making, as well as the fact that it fit the dominant scientific and political paradigms of the time.

Food Questioning Values in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales

Darrieussecq’s scandal-provoking Truismes/Pig Tales (1996), set in a near-future, neo-fascist France, involves much eating, drinking and consumption of others, whilst deliberately chewing up literary, political and feminist discourses. The naïve first-person narrator (as unaware of being a sex worker as she is of the intertexts which feed her retrospective account written in porcine form) experiences a metamorphosis oscillating between sex worker, submissive lover and sow, the flux marked by being consumed physically by food cravings and sexually by male abusers. Until momentarily fueled by acorns and truffles, self-expression through writing and eating involves danger, exemplifying the implications of the squandering of excess. Ambivalent traces of meaning in food-related truisms bring into question the possibility of countering patriarchal, capitalist violence – structural and overt. Carno-phallogocentric, cannibalistic, food- and sex-fueled soirées and the ‘others’ who serve and are sacrificed at them evoke the trauma of colonialism, the Holocaust (and French co-implication in it); excesses in turn linked to late capitalism. With the opposite of nurturing mother’s milk, and countering expectations of feminist readings, re-thinking representations of eating and drinking in Truismes raises questions of the conditions of production for and the consequences of (un)critical writing about gender, race and contemporary modes of consumption.