Contemporary Constitution Making in Asia-Pacific

This special issue features a curated set of contextualized case studies that interrogate how six Asian countries have calibrated global imperatives with domestic desires and concerns during the drafting of their latest constitution. Read together, the accounts demonstrate that the impact of globalization on what has long been thought of as a quintessential exercise of national sovereignty is ubiquitous, yet that the precise combination of the global and the local is unique to each country, determined as it is by the strength of domestic interests and factions. Taking contextualized functionalism as its premise, this introduction sketches the contours of an analytical framework to study constitution-making processes in a globalized environment. By implication, this framework is conceived in a neutral fashion and cast in functional terminology that extrapolates from the circumstances of the countries featured in this Special Issue. This, we hope, will make it a helpful toolbox to make sense of the global-local interplay in constitution-making in any country, whether located in Asia or further afield.