Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq - Couverture rigide

Arato, Andrew

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0231143028 ISBN 13 : 9780231143028

Editeur : Columbia University Press, 2009

Synopsis

The attempt in 2004 to draft an interim constitution in Iraq and the effort to enact a permanent one in 2005 were unintended outcomes of the American occupation, which first sought to impose a constitution by its agents. This two-stage constitution-making paradigm, implemented in a wholly unplanned move by the Iraqis and their American sponsors, formed a kind of compromise between the populist-democratic project of Shi'ite clerics and America's external interference.

As long as it was used in a coherent and legitimate way, the method held promise. Unfortunately, the logic of external imposition and political exclusion compromised the negotiations. Andrew Arato is the first person to record this historic process and analyze its special problems. He compares the drafting of the Iraqi constitution to similar, externally imposed constitutional revolutions by the United States, especially in Japan and Germany, and identifies the political missteps that contributed to problems of learning and legitimacy.

Instead of claiming that the right model of constitution making would have maintained stability in Iraq, Arato focuses on the fragile opportunity for democratization that was strengthened only slightly by the methods used to draft a constitution. Arato contends that this event would have benefited greatly from an overall framework of internationalization, and he argues that a better set of guidelines (rather than the obsolete Hague and Geneva regulations) should be followed in the future. With access to an extensive body of literature, Arato highlights the difficulty of exporting democracy to a country that opposes all such foreign designs and fundamentally disagrees on matters of political identity.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Andrew Arato (PhD, Political Science, Chicago) is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor in Political and Social Theory at the New School. He is the author of a number of books, including Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford, 2016), Adventures of the Constituent Power (Cambridge, 2016), and Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0231143028
• ISBN 13: 9780231143028
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 376
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible