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Regimes Reinventing Themselves

In the Arab world, most constitutional documents have been promulgated less by the nation assembled than by existing regimes seeking tools to enable them to face domestic and international challenges. Constitutions have been issued to address a varying range of concerns: international, domestic and internal to the state itself. This article traces the enabling aspects of Arab constitutions over the past century and a half, concentrating on the very recent past. In some ways, the past couple of decades have seen a definite (if limited) upsurge of interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world. Recent constitutional innovations have stressed regularization of authority, bounded democracy and a modest increase in the autonomy of some constitutional structures (especially courts and parliaments). Yet that change should not obscure an underlying continuity. For while the Arab world has joined the global trend toward greater interest in constitutional structures, the changes of the past few decades have not reversed the patterns of the past: constitutions remain politically enabling documents.