Beyond Peace and Security: The UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia and its Importance for Contemporary Constitution-Making

In her article “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” Anna Saunders focuses on constitution-making as an international practice of the past three decades and suggests that its “epistemic boundaries”—namely, the separation between the formal and material dimensions of constitution-making and the latter's exclusion from contemporary constitution-making assistance—were primarily established by scholarly work on constitution-making in the post-war era. Saunders explicitly acknowledges that her account is not the only possible history of constitution-making assistance. In this essay, I add a different layer to that history, focusing on the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia. UNTAG is often considered the first instance of international constitution-making assistance, a practice that is generally understood to have emerged after the end of the Cold War. However, UNTAG's mandate, including its constitution-making assistance component, was in fact conceived many years before its actual deployment, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. The essay shows that UN constitution-making assistance pre-dates the end of the Cold War and is linked to UN efforts to forge modern nation-states in the context of decolonization. I argue that this early case of constitution-making practice was an important blueprint for further iterations of international constitution-making assistance, not least because of the continuous involvement of individual international civil servants. Lastly, the case of Namibia is significantly different from the cases that inspired scholarly work in the post-war era, and we might ask to what extent the post-war inheritance affected this early international practice. I end with a brief reflection on Saunders's call to address the material dimension of constitution-making and caution against overemphasizing substantive questions in constitution-making assistance.