Seeking Viable Grassroots Representation Mechanisms In African Constitutions

In this book Charles Mwalimu explores viable grassroots representation mechanisms in African constitutions in order to positively integrate indigenous and modern systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. A comparative study method is used to examine the constitutional principles of chieftaincy and local government and their impact on human rights. To establish and prove lack of positive integration Mwalimu connects this failure to poor constitutionalism, development and stultified growth and human rights violations. This book proposes remedial actions to build nondiscriminatory constitutional regimes eradicating violations of human rights.

v. 1 Dynamic jurisprudential thought --

A Theory of African Constitutionalism asks and seeks to answer why we need a new theoretical framework for African constitutionalism and how this could offer us better theoretical and practical tools with which to understand, improve, and assess African constitutionalism on its own terms. By locating constitutional studies in Africa within the experiences, interactions, and contestations of power and governance beginning in precolonial times, the book presents the development and transformation of African constitutional systems across time and place, along with the attendant constitutional designs and practices ranging from the nature and operation of the African state to its vertical and horizontal government structures, to its constitutional rights regime. This title offers both a theoretically and comparatively rich, historically and contextually informed, and temporally and spatially extensive account of the nature, travails, and incremental successes of African constitutionalism with detailed case studies from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. A Theory of African Constitutionalism provides scholars, policymakers, governments, and constitution builders in Africa and beyond with new insights for reimagining the purpose, substance, and scope of constitutions and constitutionalism.

This work is the third Small Wars Journal anthology focusing on radical Sunni Islamic terrorist and insurgent groups. It covers this professional journal’s writings for 2015 and complements the earlier Global Radical Islamist Insurgency anthologies that were produced as Vol. I: 2007–2011 (published in 2015) and Vol. II: 2012–2014 (published in 2016). This anthology, which offers roughly five hundred pages of additional analysis, follows the same general conceptual breakdown as the earlier works, and is divided into two major thematic sections—one focusing on jihadi terrorism, insurgency, and the Islamic State in context and the other focusing on US-allied policy and counter-jihadi and counter–Islamic State strategies.

Much of the credit for this open-access book should go to Bilal Kargi, the Editor of KSP Journals and KSP Books. KSP Journals has published several of my articles on economics and diplomatic history, including in the Journal of Economics Library, the Journal of Economics and Political Economy, the Journal of Social and Administrative Sciences and the Journal of Economic and Social Thought. Bilal asked me in late summer 2021 if I would put these articles and others that had appeared elsewhere, or that I might want to publish for the first time, into a collection. I told him I would consider it – noting that past articles would need revisions if they were to appear again, and to have a longer shelf-life. I heard back from him within a day or two advising me that he was “waiting impatiently” for my Word updates. The collection here also includes “A different Cold War? The European Settlement of 1963 and Aftermath” and “Inflation Policy, 2022: Background,” both of which I have prepared during the last few months.

Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity examines the question of whether something similar to an "Islamic constitutionalism" has emerged out of the political and constitutional upheaval witnessed in many parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southern Asia. In order to identify its defining features and to assess the challenges that Islamic constitutionalism poses to established concepts of constitutionalism, this book offers an integrated analysis of the complex frameworks in Islamic countries, drawing on the methods and insights of comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law and legal history. European and North American experiences are used as points of reference against which the peculiar challenges, and the specific answers given to those challenges in the countries surveyed, can be assessed. The book also examines ways in which the key concepts of constitutionalism, including fundamental rights, separation of powers, democracy and rule of law, may be adapted to an Islamic context, thus providing valuable new insights on the prospects for a genuine renaissance of constitutionalism in the Islamic world in the wake of the "Arab spring."

The collected essays in this book provide a comparative examination of the process of grassroots mobilization and the development of community-based forms of popular democracy in Central and South America. The first part contains studies from individual countries on organizations ranging from those supported by governments and integrated into the country's political structure to groups that were organized against the existing political system. The organizations studied included those focusing on a particular concern, such as housing, and those with wide responsibility for community affairs; but all were organizations based on common interests where people lived and, in some cases, where people worked. The second part offers theme studies on men, women and differential participation; problems and meanings associated with decentralization, especially in relation to devolution of power to the local level and the construction of popular alternatives; and the competing theoretical paradigms of new social movements and resource mobilization.