ABSTRACT
Constitution-making is central to political transitions, and unsurprisingly given the regional and global interest in peace, human rights protection, and inter-state comity, international actors have increasingly sought to influence the choices being made therein. While external assistance is not a new phenomenon – for example, German scholars assisted the Japanese drafters of the Meiji Constitution in 1889 – the past two decades have seen an increasing institutionalization of this aspect of international action in transitional governance. This institutionalization has brought with it the consequence that external advice is often not entirely free to be tailored to the best needs of the context at hand but is limited by legal constraints and standards developed in, by, and for other national or transnational contexts. This chapter provides a brief overview of different forms of external advice to constitution-making and examines concrete examples of how constraints shape these different forms.
