The United Nation's Role in Post-Conflict Constitution-Making Processes: TWAIL Insights

Abstract

AbstractThis essay analyzes how Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) insights have illuminated some but not all themes relevant to understanding post-Cold War internationalised constitution-making processes such as those of Afghanistan and Iraq and the United Nation's (UN) constitutional support therein. It argues that the UN's constitutional support has evolved into an established practice and that the need to interrogate the very idea of the internationalisation of constitution-making, – essentially a domestic process – places the legitimacy of, and the explanations offered for such support into question. It concludes that given its historic opposition to and commitment to end the exploitative relations between the Western powers and the Third World and all contemporary colonial forms in the Third World, TWAIL is the best optic through which the UN's constitutional support in general and its role in the constitution-making process of Afghanistan, in particular, may be examined. For only then can the broader historical and ideological aspects and colonial continuities fundamentally significant to understanding internationalised constitution-making processes and the UN's role therein be uncovered.