Research

Agenda-Setting Research

Constitutional Transitions structures and leads agenda-setting research projects that produce pioneering scholarship and a comparative foundation for constitution building. We address constitutional questions of practical importance in the field and deep scholarly interest to the academy.

Topics for agenda-setting research are carefully selected.

• Topics are practically important to constitutional transitions currently underway.

• Research questions address issues relevant to more than one single country, and are preferably regional in scope.

• Projects concern issues where existing research is incomplete, outdated, or non-existent, and where research furthers an important scholarly agenda.

Agenda-setting research projects are structured to be collaborative, responsive and achieve maximum impact.

• We work with domestic partners - think tanks, universities, and NGOs with a sophisticated research capacity.   Working with domestic partners:

• allows domestic actors to set the research agenda, ensuring that Constitutional Transition’s work is relevant, informed, and sensitive to domestic political context;

• positions Constitutional Transitions to tap into existing domestic networks of experts;

• enables Constitutional Transitions to build capacity in the global south, where most partners will be located; and

• allows Constitutional Transitions to project the New York University’s (NYU) presence in these regions.

• We work with international partners – international organizations and governments - who have a long-standing track record for support of constitution building.

• Together with our partners, Constitutional Transitions convenes international networks of senior policy practitioners and academic experts from NYU (including its Hauser Global Law School Program faculty) and around the world.

• We complete agenda-setting research projects over an 18-to-36-month timeframe, to produce policy-relevant research outputs that can be used in actual constitutional processes without being driven by the immediate exigencies and vagaries of political timetables.

• Research is disseminated through online and open-source publications in multiple languages.

For a description of our first thematic research project, “Security Sector Oversight in Post-Authoritarian Contexts: Protecting Democratic Consolidation from Partisan Abuse,” click here.