ABSTRACT
The establishment of a constitution—a two decades-long arena in the case of Kenya—is also a threshold for further rounds of challenge and contestation, as interests and rights are asserted, the constitutionality of new laws are challenged, as the executive seeks to extend its authoritative reach, or as political and economic pressures are claimed to require unprecedented exercises of power. Constitutional pluralism is rejected either because its pluralist credentials do not add up – it is ultimately either constitutional monism with new transnational horizons or mere old-fashioned constitutional plurality – or because if it is genuinely pluralistic this is at the expense of its specifically constitutional quality. The future of constitutionalism in Kenya will depend to a large on the successive regimes' commitment to continuous re-engineering of the state and its governance instruments to effectively respond to the dynamic needs of the people and the destabilizing globalization forces at work.
