Constitutional Design as an Enabler of Peace: Colombia and the Constitutional Reform of 1991

Abstract

Colombia’s long road to its 2016 peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia has been heavily dissected for the lessons it reveals about the challenge of restoring rule of law in the midst of conflict and instability. Most analysis, however, has focused on one of four areas – security, peace processes, human rights, and legal and institutional reform. Constitutional design, while fully acknowledged as foundational, has been largely dismissed by practitioners as being the province of academics with minimal relevance to political imperatives on the ground. As a result, it has been conceptually divorced from questions of how to restore security and achieve viable peace. This paper takes a different approach, merging comparative constitutional analysis with Colombia’s constitutional reform of 1991 to illustrate how constitution-making can be used as a platform for compromise in deeply divided societies and set future conditions for peace. Viewed comprehensively through an historical lens, Colombia illuminates four key insights on the relevance of constituent processes in conflict resolution and illustrates a variation on incrementalistic approaches that have been advocated in the context of constitutional development elsewhere.

Keywords: Colombia; Constitutional Reform; 1991; Peace Agreements; Institution Building; Plan Colombia