Pride and Prejudice in African Constitutional LAw: Cohesion or Exclusion from Global North Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”. Typical of our ancestors, who in the nineteenth century, having the destiny of Africa in their hands, married the colonial masters to meet their social needs. Upon marrying, the latter prioritized the application of Northern constitutional cultures and principles to the detriment of pre-colonial legal orders. Thus, I argue that mimicry of the legal order of the Global North has taken root in African constitutions and that it serves as a source of pride and prejudice for African states in the twenty-first century. By employing a theory of critical legal studies, a law and literature approach, a law and culture approach and a Third World approach to international law, I equate the constitutional principles of the Global North in the eighteenth century with the constitutional principles of the twenty-first century in Africa. This paper mainly analyzes constitutional principles like sovereignty, constitutionalism, democracy, and the rule of law as well as institutions such as constitutional courts in their role as arbiters in African constitutionalism. Furthermore, I will show that these principles originated in France, Great Britain, and the United States in the eighteenth century. Moreover, these principles have been beneficial for human development at the national level but have deprived African states of the power of choice; internationally. Therefore, I will propose strategic, institutional, and substantive changes in the African constitutional order and global power dynamics.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".