The role of external actors during the 2014 Tunisia constitutional transition through the lenses of critical comparative constitutional law

Since the end of the Cold War, constitution-making has evolved to become an increasingly internationalized process. The constituent power is classically understood by the literature as unconstrained. However, this is at odds with the political reality in which the constituent power is embedded: if the new regime desires legitimacy in the international community, it will have to abide by the constraints of different external actors. The contribution of this paper will be to examine how the international, transnational and domestic legal framework are intertwined; while the socio-legal aspect will critically investigate how the actors shape constitutional norms, and how political and social constraints become legal rules. It will be illustrated by drawing on the case of the Tunisian constitutional transition. The first part of the paper will a methodological discussion. Drawing on comparative constitutional law and critical legal studies, it will argue that the 'New approaches to comparative law', which brought together Critical Legal Studies and Comparative Law in the 1997 Utah Conference are better suited to examine the role of external actors during constitutional transitions. The second part of the paper will take a closer look the Tunisian constitutional transition drawing on the findings of fieldwork undertaken during February and March 2018 and analyse the role of external actors during the constitutional transitions. It will examine, among others, the role of UN Agencies and international NGOs