If constitutional legitimacy is based on violence, what does this mean for democracy?
Almost every state in the world has a written constitution and, for the great majority, the constitution is the law that controls the organs of the state. But is a constitution the best device to rule a country?
Western political systems tend to be 'constitutional democracies', dividing the system into a domain of politics, where the people rule, and a domain of law, set aside for a trained elite. Legal, political and constitutional practices demonstrate that constitutionalism and democracy seem to...

Approaching the concept of Islamic constitutionalism from a comparative perspective, this thought-provoking study by Antoni Abat i Ninet and Mark Tushnet uses traditional Western political theory as a lens to develop a framework for analyzing the events known as the 'Arab Spring'. Writing with clarity and insight, the authors place Western and Arabic traditions into a constructive dialogue. They focus on whether we can develop a 'theory of revolutions' that helps us understand events occurring at divergent times at geographically separate locations.

This timely book offers a novel theory of constitutional revolutions, providing a new and engaging framework for critically assessing how revolutions and contra-revolutions, transitional periods and the phenomenon of oblivion influence constitutional change. Contributions by leading scholars in the field explore the relationship between revolutions and constitutional order and disorder, considering in particular the impact of political transitions, situations of emergency, coup detat and the role of memory and oblivion during times of revolution. Through a series of case studies, the book...