The Theocratic Challenge to Constitution Drafting in Post-Conflict States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of a new legal order - constitutional theocracy, which is now shared in one form or another by dozens of countries in the developing world - provides important insights into the sociopolitical role of constitutionalism in predominantly religious settings. Regimes throughout the new world of constitutional theocracies have been struggling with these foundational quandaries, forced to navigate between cosmopolitanism and parochialism, modern and traditional meta-narratives, constitutional principles and religious injunctions, contemporary governance and ancient texts, judicial and pious interpretation. More often than not, the clash between these conflicting visions results in fierce struggles over the nature of the body politic and its organizing principles. In this Article, I explore several key aspects of constitutionalism in a theocratic world. I begin by defining the concept of constitutional theocracy and its emergence as a new form of governance over the last few decades. Second, I identify the challenges posed by the theocratic surge to canonical power-sharing, consociational models for mitigating tensions in multi-ethnic polities. In the Article's third Part, I survey five constitutional responses to the problem of religion and state and examine a few innovative legal developments employed by countries in the Islamic world to hedge the challenge of constitutional theocracy. In the fourth Part, I explore the secularizing role of constitutional courts and jurisprudence in predominantly religious polities. Examples are drawn from Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Nigeria, Malaysia, and other polities facing deep social and political tensions along the secular/religious divide.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".