Dialogic Democracy, Feminist Theory and Women’s Participation in Constitution-Making

As the Director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy, I was involved in the constitutional amendment process in Liberia that ended last year. Although the process occupied several years, it ended without producing any amendments. In this paper, I will reflect on what can be learned from the experience in Liberia about the issue of women’s participation in constitution making. I will use the lessons I draw from this experience to generate a more general theoretical model for thinking about women’s participation in constitution-making, based on a feminist-inspired understanding of dialogic democracy. I believe that this model can be useful as a heuristic in designing constitution-making processes in a wide range of countries, and can help us to organize and systematize our more countryspecific insights.