 I just want to welcome you, I'll say a couple of words by welcome, welcome you all to this symposium today. Particularly those of you who have travelled from Afrar, from North America, from Toronto, from Harvard or New York, or between New York and Harvard. I think someone also from the EUI. Anyway, thanks very much for coming. We really appreciate it, really appreciate hearing what you might have to offer us. I also want to thank Tanima for his unstinting effort in putting this together, coming up with the idea, organising it, doing everything pretty much single-handed, but I think he's done a fabulous job. There's something I think peculiarly prescient about the organisation of a symposium today. In part of course because of the timing, we're in spring and in some ways it calls for us to reflect back on events. Four years ago in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Also because in some ways for those of us more local, it is in a sense the inauguration of our spring break. It's the end of one part of our academic life, the entry into another. So sort of a demarcation between our two fields of work. Llywodraeth Spring has never pointed out in his summary for the symposium, has elicited a range of responses for all of us and perhaps responses that have changed for all of us over different moments of time, from perhaps excitement, expectation, enthusiasm to fatalism, pessimism and in some cases alarm. Indeed I think the very language that we're used to describe the events in some ways invites us much. So when we think about the spring, the obvious idea that comes to mind is the seasonal variety. The spring that, in a sense, you see when you're outside, that offers out the prospect of metaphorical flowering and plenitude perhaps within the Middle East. But of course that kind of spring always is followed not only by summer and autumn, but also rigorously every year by winter and perhaps so the spring itself invites the reflection upon the idea of cycles and political affairs or legal affairs. The second variety of course is the spring, the fluvial spring, the spring that in a sense offers out a new origin or a new source for perhaps modes of governance, forms of constitutionality or political authority. So the second form of spring is perhaps something that we have discovered or is discovered. But again one is left to think about what the trajectory of that metaphor might be. Of course there's the third form of spring that one might be thinking about here. Is it just the mechanical spring of the watch which once it runs out requires rewinding, reminds us of the need for active intervention in order to set the clock running again. So if we're not careful, things will simply grind to a halt. You're pretty sensed from all of these reflections, none of which go anywhere in particular that I am profoundly ambivalent about how to think about the events in question. Caught up as Neymar puts it in the simple opposites that the purpose of this symposium is to get beyond. Unclear as to how to read the events and their aftermath, how to understand the place of law or constitutionalism and the relationship to broader themes of gender or political economy. So in that sense I'm very much looking forward to the symposium. Not because I suppose I'm going to get answers to those but in a sense be offered a way of navigating through them, a way of thinking round them and I'm very much looking forward to all the contributions this evening. One final parenthetical remark, one of the things I appreciate about it is the way in which Neymar has sought to try and bring together people from different disciplines. I think in a subject like this it's fairly natural that one may be looking beyond the discipline of law for people to have important and interesting things to say and I think it's a context in which we know a sense the legal interventions or legal thought is critically dependent upon a whole range of other disciplines. But I think one could think very much more broadly as this being in a sense an archetych of a way in which we may go about having a set of conversations going forward that bring together people from disciplines whether that you want to think about it in terms of an interdisciplinary conversation or perhaps better a transdisciplinary or even a counterdisciplinary conversation. I think it's something that is a particular mark and a particularly remarkable feature I suppose of today's symposium. So thanks very much Neymar for organising it. Thank you so much Dean Craven and thank you all for coming. So one of the common reactions I got in recent weeks and months when I was saying to friends, colleagues and family that I'm organising a symposium on the Arab Spring was exactly this question. What spring? What Arab spring? Because people are so disillusioned and disenchanted with the process and the moment of hopeful optimism that accompanied the first uprising was replaced by other feelings. So as Dean Craven has said the attempt in organising this is exactly to answer this question and this is the reason why we have this conference. It's trying to engage in a thoughtful reflection on the events and the processes we have been witnessing and we are witnessing in a way that moves beyond the alarmism or the journalistic simplifications that we seem to be condemned to have. Because what seems to be happening is that many are clinging to retrospective condemnation of the events in which we condemn the initial moments of revolt because many of us deemed them or deemed the current situation as if it were necessarily determined by these initial moments of revolt. And this retrospective condemnation questions the real motives for the initial support for the revolution. It seems that some of us support revolutions against dictators we dislike but not against dictators we like. In this case support for the initial moments of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia had nothing to do with democracy and popular sovereignty. Another thing that might be going on is that many of us seem to reify current realities because we are living these moments of upheaval and rapid change. And this reification happens because many people are either reducing the revolutionary process to events or they subject the label revolution to an outcome-based yardstick. And this reification stability becomes paramount because it's directly tied to self-interest. So I want to insist on using the phrase Arab Spring and I want to insist on using the phrase Arab revolutions despite the current conditions and despite the seeming failure chaos or counter-revolution in most of the Arab states. It seems to me that commentators rushing to deny the revolutionary or the spring labels from the Arab uprisings are reducing these events to a limited element or a singular focus. Although some revolutions, you may call them social revolutions, might produce a more immediate or discernible change in property relations, others had a merely political character. So a total history of revolution would have to address social structures, ideology, organizational capacity and conjuncture. These different elements caution us not only from the reductionism of structuralism but also from the idealism of voluntarism and they also highlight the role of the unexpected. Now revolutions should not be judged according to their success or failure nor are they necessarily state-capturing processes. Abdul Razak Takriti, who is sitting here, argues that judging revolutions in his book Monsoon Revolution according to their performance reduces entire processes to their end result and overlooks substantive elements. He also argues that state-centrism denies the relevance of the revolutionary category to several non-European peoples. Given that revolutions, as in the case of the Zufari revolution in Oman in the 60s and the 70s, which lasted for about a decade, preceded the formation of the state and although the British and the Sultan eventually defeated it militarily, the Zufari revolution succeeded in producing far-reaching and lasting changes including abolishing slavery. Similarly, Iqbal Ahmed notes that although the Algerian revolution against the French was defeated militarily, it emerged particularly victorious. Juan Cuul argues that the Egyptian revolution of 1881 and 1882, the Aorabi revolution, was a social revolution against an informal empire despite its military defeat on the hands of the British. The lack of dethroning of the ruler, notwithstanding, it led to both a situation of multiple sovereignty and also to changes in social structure through a series of revolts and intra-class conflicts. But even outside the anti-colonial revolutionary context, success has not been always a determining factor. The European Spring of Nations of 1848 was not exactly a story of success at the end of the day, and yet we still retain the name, and some scholars find many similarities between the Arab Spring and the European Spring. The counter-revolutionary backlash, state violence and the seeming limited institutional structural change are all of particular relevance, yet none of them, in a historical perspective, would seem decisive to rule out the revolutionary label from the Arab Spring. In this context, the Egyptian situation is not particularly sharply distinct from the French upheaval after the revolution in 1789. One scholar writes, the French revolution was resisted by powerful deeply rooted institutions and met powerful internal opposition. The revolution was bloody and culminated in a reign of terror that turned French society and the French revolution did not end. The ideological struggle it reflected and perspectives on the desirability, purpose and character of the revolution have continued to divide France virtually until the present day." As for the terror that followed the French revolution, scholars have shown that both the violence and the Jacobins need to be fairly judged in order not to dismiss the revolutionaries and not to reduce the revolution to the exclusive prism of violence. As for the social aspect, some would have us believe that only an October style communist revolution that transformed the social structure would qualify as a revolution. However, one needs to recall that Hegel criticised the French revolution as a liberal revolution that is incapable of establishing a collective community and that is too inhibited by contractualist abstractions. Yet others maintain that the French revolution is only superficially bourgeois as it was effectively a multi-class alliance that institutionalised preceding socio-economic transformations. Despite these critiques, the French revolution is still considered not only a revolution but also a main paradigm for revolutions. This is not to say that I like and approve everything that I see unfolding. Asserting the revolutionary or the spring label does not imply inherent goodness or determinism that it couldn't have been otherwise. But it only says that we need not reduce these events to the mere instability that we watch right now. So this is one reason why I wanted to organise this. The second reason is that the role of law and constitution making seems to have been understudied in these events. And that's a bit surprising given the visibility and the importance of the role of law and constitution in both Egypt and Tunisia. And the fact that they were, the law was implicated both in advancing and pre-empting the production of certain outcomes. So this examination is also important for us academics because sometimes theories seem to be divorced from the messy reality of politics and we tend to idealise constitutions and constitution making processes. This is also why this symposium as Matt said explicitly ties the legal and the political. So we have two great panels ahead. I look forward to the discussion. Thanks a lot for the participants. Some of them came from afar and I appreciate that. Now I understand that the issues that we are going to discuss are very relevant to current events and therefore many of us have strong opinions about these but I trust that we will have respectful discussions throughout the day. Please note that the event is recorded. So take that into account if you choose to participate during the Q&A session and no outside recording is allowed without permission. So thank you so much. Please welcome these first panel. Mashoud and the others please take your seats. Yes. Good afternoon everyone and I welcome everyone to this first panel constituted of this very distinguished colleagues whom I will be introducing soon. The general theme of this first panel is who's constitution. Before I introduce the panel I just want to say a few introductory words. As we know constitutions today have become a sine qua non of effective democracy and good governance globally. Thus as I mean has been said by Nimmer in the wake of the Arab Spring the development of new constitutions to formulate the future political arrangements of the Arab Spring countries was perceived as imperative. To that effect the idea of constitutionalism was high on the agenda. Constitutionalism is seen as a normative discourse through which constitutions are justified, defended, criticised, denounced or otherwise engaged with. The idea of constitutionalism symbolises the interaction between moral, political and legal philosophy. Within that discourse a good and legitimate constitutionalism is conventionally characterised in form of a liberal, monist, statist and most importantly circular constitutional order aimed at providing legal basis for ensuring good governance. Conventional constitutionalism is therefore underpinned by strict monism that is constitutional monism. Now how has the law politics and constitutional making in the Arab Spring adhered to that conventional conceptualisation of constitutionalism. This is I mean what the first session is trying to interrogate and the panel will be interrogating this under the broad theme of whose constitution. To do this we are really honoured to have Professor Mohamed Faddel from Toronto University who will be speaking on constitutionalism, democracy and political division and Dr Nadia Morzuqi from the European University who will be speaking after him on the politics of compromise from the constitutional debate to elections. He died at Haika from Harvard Law School who will be looking at the puzzle of the persistent faith in constitutionalism. Our discourseant will be my colleague from the law school here Dr Scott Newton. Now without taking much more of your time I will want to go on street to the panellists. Each one of the panellists will speak for 20 minutes. After that Scott Newton will have 10 minutes to discuss both three papers and at the end will have about 20 minutes for questions and answers. If you want to ask a question just give a signal with your hand raised and there's somebody with the microphone will come to you. I hope that we'll have an invigorating session. I will not defer to Professor Mohamed Faddel to give his presentation. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here. So I'm going to be talking about an idea from Rawls' political liberalism called the modus vivende. I want to sort of explicate why in the context facing a country like Egypt or Tunisia or any Arab society in this particular moment that a modus vivende contrary to the Rawls' reluctance to endorse the idea of a democratic modus vivende is actually a good thing given the alternatives and I'll try to make that argument. I guess in the spirit of Nimr and his introduction I'll just lay out on the table what the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions meant for me as an Egyptian who's lived his entire life outside of Egypt. I thought it was an opportunity and I still hope that it's an opportunity for Egypt to at least achieve a procedural democracy because all things being equal. A procedural democracy is better than the kinds of alternatives I think that we're seeing today. By defending the idea of a modus vivende I'm essentially defending the desirability at least from a prudential perspective of seeking out procedural democracy. So John Rawls. So in his book, Political Liberalism Rawls talks about the problem of stability. Political stability is the problem that animates his work and he's puzzled by how it's possible to have political stability against a background of deep division in society. And he talks about two ways this could happen. One is which there is something called as modus vivende. A modus vivende he finds to be not very attractive. He calls it political in the wrong way. What he means by saying political in the wrong way is that stability is contingent in a society governed by modus vivende because it depends on the distribution of power among various social forces. Think of it as a truce between warring parties as opposed to a permanent peace between parties. And so in a modus vivende every party is afraid that if the balance of power shifts its rival is going to take steps to eliminate it. So clearly a modus vivende is not ideal because there is a certain amount of fear that continues to exist in society that if things should change it could result in detrimental and substantial losses of that party perhaps even in an extreme it's complete elimination. So in contrast we all suggest what we want to do is we want to have a constitution that establishes what he calls or it can be reflective or generative of an overlapping consensus. And this is what he calls political in the right way. It's political in the right way because it takes into account the reality and permanence of division and pluralism in society. But despite that the constitution is capable of generating moral loyalty on the part of all major groups in society even though each group has different moral reasons for endorsing the constitution. So even though there's not unity at a deep moral level there's unity at a political level. And in such a case if such a constitution would come into existence different groups would have no fear of losing power because in that case even if their rivals took power they could be confident that because their rivals share a moral commitment to that constitution they're not going to use their power to eliminate them. So from the perspective of ideal theory then what we should be looking for is a constitution that is capable of generating this ideal of an overlapping consensus. But the problem is how do we get there? How do we get to a constitution that is capable of generating an overlapping consensus? Well the answer is adopt a constitution that no reasonable person could reject. Obvious. Now the problem is that's sort of easier said than done, right? And so Rawls adopts this heuristic famously known as the veil of ignorance with the original position which we posit a hypothetical constitutional convention in which the delegates to that convention know nothing about themselves. They're completely ahistorical beings, they have no particularity, right? They know they have a general knowledge of what life is like out there in the real world, right? And they know that if you're on the wrong side of it it can be quite nasty and dangerous, right? So the idea here is that people behind a veil of ignorance would rationally adopt those rules, only those rules that would make the least that would make the best would only distinguish between people if it made the least well off better. Better off than they would be otherwise. In other words we're not going to accept any kind of inequality unless it makes everybody better off in that situation, right? And so you wouldn't accept any kind of discrimination based on race, color, gender, religion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so this generates, the original position generates something that he calls constitutional essentials, equal basic rights and liberties. The fullest scheme of liberties that would be consistent with everyone enjoying those kinds of liberties. The reciprocity principle, right? Now he gives what he calls deliberative priority of the basic rights and liberties on the assumption that people care more about their liberty than anything else. In other words you would not gamble, let's say if you're a religionist you believe in God and you believe that God will hold you accountable in the next life for example. You would not gamble the fate of your soul for the possibility of living in a religious state where your religion is on top. What if you turn out to be living in a communist totalitarian godless state then that would be the worst possible outcome for you. So you would favor a regime of religious freedom and religious neutrality, okay? That all makes sense, no disputes for me. Then you also have what he calls the general structure of government and political process, which is largely responsible for things like distributive justice. So Rawls has the difference principle where inequality is not to be acceptable unless it makes the least worse off better than they would be in the absence. Of that inequality. Now the problem is from a philosophical perspective is that it's relatively easy to generate the scheme of equal rights and liberties because they're very abstract. It's very difficult to figure out from the veil of ignorance the second proposition, the general structure of the government and issues of distributive justice. So as a practical matter when it comes to constitutional writing pluralism is acceptable in the latter but not the former. So from a Rawlsian perspective constitutions in order to be legitimate they all have to have basically the same rights and liberties because these are determinant and can be known with precision from the veil of ignorance. Pluralism is only permissible in the second feature, right? The structural, you know, the way we organize our society in terms of methods of redistribution. You know, whether we have a bicameral legislature or just unicameral executive system of government or parliamentary etc. These are things that are amenable to pluralism but not the basic scheme of rights and liberties. And so the relationship of constitutional essentials to basic structure begins with this conception of rights. Then it moves into sort of the empirical institutions of society. But we have to be careful here. This is all an explication from the perspective of ideal theory of how we would go about this problem of writing a constitution if we really weren't real empirical people stuck in actual society's ref by actual conflict. So the fact is there's no constitution in human history that has been drafted through a process of the Rawlsian kind of veil of ignorance of which he speaks, right? All it can do is create an ideal standard by which we can judge actual institutions. So instead actual constitution drafting exists in a world of non-ideal theory, right? In which there are historical societies ref by actual divisions determined by their own particular histories and path dependencies and the particular interest groups and division of power that actually exists in any one time, right? And so the problem then becomes is how do you go from actual historical societies that are characterized by these sharp, even existential divisions into something that is approaching what would be a Rawlsian Well Order Society governed by a constitution enjoying an overlapping consensus. Because from an empirical perspective that only comes into existence over time. It can only be approached asymptotically. It can't be posited simply by philosophical reflection. So we need to have a way of thinking as practical law givers how to move society from a modus of endate to something more rich and more thick as Rawls is describing, as Rawls's ideal theory describes. So the first thing that Rawls mentions, he doesn't spend a lot of time and I admit maybe just a couple of sections in a 300 page book, is that how is it possible to go from division divided society characterized by modus of endate into something approaching a well ordered society enjoying an overlapping consensus. Well we begin by what he calls a constitutional consensus. A constitutional consensus is different than an overlapping consensus. It's much thinner, right? It doesn't extend deeply into society because the principles of a constitutional consensus are just that. They're just principles of constitutions. They're not accepted as deeper moral principles that everyone in society shares, right? And their characteristic, a constitutional consensus is characteristic of the kinds of agreement that comes out of a modus of endate. But the function of a constitutional consensus is to essentially moderate political rivalry. Because the absence, the choice, if you don't have a constitutional consensus, the option is to have armed conflict, right? So even though a constitutional consensus is much thinner and cannot achieve, does not solve the problem of the modus of endate, it does solve the problem of a civil war. It prevents civil war and armed conflict from taking place in the society, right? And it instead encourages political rivals to solve their problems within the context of a procedural constitution that moderates their conflict. Now if that's all that were to take place, then as a liberal, you wouldn't necessarily find it to be very attractive, right? Instead, and I think this is maybe the more hopeful move in Rawls, is that if a society can succeed in producing a constitutional consensus, even though it falls short of the constitutional essentials required from the perspective of ideal theory, it then begins the process of deepening and widening the moral consensus in society such that society begins to move toward the ideal of the well-ordered society and toward a constitution that satisfies the ideal conditions of an ideal constitution. And so that's why Rawls speaks of the well-ordered society and the ideal constitution that governs it as a realistic utopia. It's utopian because the idea of a constitution that everyone or every reasonable person will endorse is a utopia. But on the other hand, he thinks it's realistic because given proper circumstances and given a little bit of luck and time, it would be possible for a society to actually achieve such a constitution. Now, applying this idea to the Egyptian experience, right? I don't think it should be too hard to make the case that Egypt's political life is characterized by lots of sharp divisions, right? There's first Islamist versus non-Islamist, which is given maybe too much attention in popular coverage, but it is very real. But there's also Islamist versus Islamist. There are at least three conceptions of Islamism in Egypt. There's state-sponsored Islamism, there's Muslim Brotherhood-styled Islamism, and there's Salafi-styled Islamism, and they are all in many ways incompatible. There's also non-Islamist versus non-Islamist. You have liberal Egyptians, I mean real liberals, right? But you also have secular nationalists, you also have communists, you also have socialists, right? So there's deep ideological division in the country and it's not simply a question of Islamism versus non-Islamism, right? And the important point I would say again is that there is no hegemonic group. There might be a group that has a plurality of maybe 25 or 30% of the population, but no one group can credibly claim to enjoy the support of a clear majority of Egyptian society. So Egyptian society represents a case of radical pluralism, right? Not just pluralism, but radical pluralism, right? And therefore division. Now you also have other sources besides ideological for social division, namely class and income. So per capita income in Egypt is around $9 a day, but this really masks the deep economic divisions in the country. 70% of Egyptians live on $4 a day or less. 85% live on $5 a day or less. Only 3.5% of Egyptians live on more than $9 a day or have income that exceed the per capita income. Only 1% of Egyptians annual incomes exceed $5,100 a year, right? So you have a very, very sharp and skewed distribution of income to not the 1%, but the .01% in the country, right? And so there's going to be obviously a lot of division based on the distribution of national income. But yet again, we can go beyond these aggregate numbers and look at other kinds of division, urban versus rural. Extreme poverty, only 3% of urban dwellers are subject to extreme poverty while 10% of the rural population is living in extreme poverty. Absolute poverty, 10% of urban dwellers are living in absolute of general poverty versus 30% in the countryside. Upper Egypt versus the rest of the country. 83% of Egypt's extreme poor is in Upper Egypt. 67% of Egypt's poor is in Upper Egypt, right? And this is all based on World Bank data. Now, in light of that, I think if you look at the voting patterns in Egypt after 2012, the results are not very surprising. It's not surprising that Upper Egypt voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, right? You can see that the Muslim Brotherhood has deep social roots outside of the cities. Okay, anyway. So I have to start wrapping up. Okay, now I want to go very quickly to compare some provisions from a big picture from 2012 constitution to 2013 constitution from the perspective of a modus vivende, right? So the 2013 constitution is marginally more protective of individual rights than the 2012 constitution, but it's much more restrictive of political rights. The 2012 constitution empowered parliament relative to the presidency and the judiciary, right? Whereas the 2013 constitution dramatically weakened parliament relative to the judiciary. And so this raises the question of whether or not it represents the kind of constitutional consensus that can help evolve toward a more overlapping consensus from a Rawlsian perspective. One of the virtues of the constitutional consensus in Rawls's opinion is that by bringing in all political parties under the rubric of the constitution, they can then engage in fruitful cooperation and learn certain political virtues like the virtues of compromise, give and take, et cetera, et cetera. So that over time, they all learn to moderate their demands. Now one of the key variables here is time. But I don't see how this can work if you exclude a substantial group of the body politic. And under the 2013, it's not just religious parties that are excluded. Also regional parties are excluded. As I tried to show, there's massive development gap between Upper Egypt and the rest of the country. So we're not allowed to form a regional political party under the 2013 Egyptian constitution, right? So I'm very pessimistic about its ability to generate or to evolve from a constitutional consensus reflecting modus vivende to something that would be more morally satisfactory. Now, to conclude, is there a liberal way forward? Well, I think Egyptians need to think about, ironically, instead of thinking about rights and freedoms, which of course has deliberative priority from a Rawlsian perspective. But I would say from the perspective of non-ideal theory, actually the institutions of governance are much more important. Because if you're in a situation where you're governed by modus vivende, you need to generate certain political virtues of cooperation, of compromise, et cetera, et cetera. So this requires building institutions that will allow people to do that. So there are choices that can be made. And these choices, I think, have significance in that regard. First is should Egypt have a presidential versus a parliamentary system? The problem with the presidential system is that it's a winner-take-all kind of election. And so in a deeply divided society, how is it possible that one person can reasonably represent all of society? It's very hard, in my opinion, to see how a presidential system can function in Egypt without polarising differences rather than reducing them. So a parliamentary system might be more appropriate. Secondly, unitary versus federal system. Again, as I've tried to show, there are vast regional differences in the country. The differences could be moderated by delegating real and substantial power to provinces by creating effective local governments whereby local majorities are empowered, not only to make them feel included, but also to protect urban majorities who might feel threatened by people in the countryside. I'm not saying that they should be or shouldn't be, but I just recognize that fear is there. So instead of allowing an urban coalition to seize central power, just devolve power more generally. And that way you could maybe reduce political tensions among these different groups. Not good at PowerPoint. Unicameral versus bicameral legislatures. Again, here, one of the problems with unicameral legislatures is that if you have local representation and there's a great deal of difference between the median opinions of a local district and the median opinion of a national majority, you can solve that problem by having a second house where in order to be elected you have to appeal to a much broader range of the constituency. So I think a bicameral, a second house in Egypt could function well if it's going to be answerable to a broader constituency because the more local the constituency is, the more extreme the candidate will likely be, right, where there's lots of division. Finally, last thing, if you do choose a presidential system, consider a cumulative voting system instead of a one vote one person system whereby voters can rank in order of preference several candidates. So a candidate, in order to win, not just has to win one vote, but has to win the relative preferences of all the voters. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Murmur Ferdin, for that. I believe you have a lot of questions at the end. We'll move quickly to the last speaker, Hidayat Haikal, from Harvard, who will be speaking on the puzzle of persistent faith in constitutionalism. So thank you very much for having me today. I would like to start my presentation by sketching a typology of at least three different ways to think about constitutionalism in the aftermath of events that significantly disrupt and existing social, political and or economic order. After doing so, I will then try to situate Egypt's constitutional saga since 2011 within this typology. So I contender at least three different ways to think about the exercise of constitution making and constitutionalism after disruption. As you may have noticed, I purposely avoid the use of the word revolution, and that was before hearing the comments of Nimr Sultani. But I'm glad I did avoid the use of the word revolution to include all types of events that significantly disrupt an existing order, including, for example, civil wars, foreign occupations, declarations of independence, etc. A revolution also typically proceeds in two stages, the disruption of an existing order being the first one, followed by the consolidation of some new order that is meaningfully different than the order that came before it. But constitution making often follows the first stage of disruption and doesn't always wait and does not need to wait for the culmination of a new order. The three different approaches which I propose primarily to use as thinking tools are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. They can coexist in different parts of the same constitutional exercise. First, there is revolutionary constitutionism, and I'm sorry I used the word revolution, in which the victorious faction at the moment of constitutional drafting writes the constitution. It usually locks in its gains, it outlines its vision of how power in the new order will be organized, and the words of O'Cawthogando, the constitution, lays some sort of a power map. The map frames the order and opens it up for a certain type of politics, but it's politics that does or is supposed to do the work of social, political, and or economic transformation. A successful example of the type of constitutionism, one would say is the United States constitution. So 1787-88, a much less successful example is post 1789 France. So France burned through four constitutions in the first ten years after its revolution. In part because the revolutionary process was still in flux during that time culminating in only short lived victories that produced constitutional texts or power maps that also turned out to be short lived. And here I'm echoing the work or the analysis by Gary Jacobson on the difference of constitution making after the culmination of a simple political revolution, read the US versus the difficulties of writing constitution in a total revolution that has yet to be accomplished, read France. Second, there is transformative constitutionalism. The paradigmatic example here is post apartheid South Africa. This type of constitutionism aspires that the constitution itself, so the text itself will be the instrument of social transformation. I borrow this concept from the work of Carl Clare and Dennis Davis on South Africa, where they argue that the South African constitution aims to lay a constitutional superstructure to transform South Africa into a democratic egalitarian society committed to social justice. Rather than coming in the aftermath of transformation or framing such a transformation, this type of constitutionism openly admits that the transformation or the revolution is unfinished business, and here is the important distinction. That type of constitutionism enlists the constitution's enforcers, namely the courts armed with judicial review to enact the desired transformation. Finally, there is the often rated status quo constitutionalism or in sophisticated American parlance kick the can down the road constitutionalism. This is an agreement to disagree about divisive issues and to move forward only on areas however minimal in which there may be more of a background consensus. This type is therefore more likely to coexist with a weak form of judicial review in which by design peak or constitutional courts have less room to have the final say on so-called mega political questions in the formulation of Ron Herschel. An example is post 1948 Israel, which avoided drafting a constitution in part because the political parties constituting the new order could not agree on key issues such as the role of religion versus secularism. Of course, they could also not agree on the borders or the expansion aspirations of Israel. I contend that Tunisia's recent constitution making exercise and here I will encroach on my co-panelists turf, especially as pertaining to the role of Islam or Sharia and political life was an example of this third type of constitutionalism. So the Tunisian clause relating to the role of Islamic political life, one could read it in essence as a ratification of the pre existing Burkiba-Ben Ali secularist order because the power brokers of the new order realize how explosive a division on the issue can be. As Nadia was saying sort of with the example of Egypt or with Egypt providing a counter example of how divisive the issue of the role of Islam in public life can be. So in this sense I would be endorsing a reading of the Tunisian constitution at least as pertaining to this issue as more of conflict avoidance and conflict resolution, but I'll be happy to speak about that with my co-panelists later. So enough about Tunisia, I was flown in to talk about Egypt. So my argument here is that Egypt got caught in a conundrum since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. The main political actors that had taken part in the 2011 protests, which I very crudely lay out here and I will get attacked for my crudeness and happily so. So the main political actors taking part in the 2011 protests had a lot of faith, too much faith in constitutionalism. That is my argument. Not in a constitution that could be a power map to open up or frame a political space, but in a constitution that could itself, the text itself be the instrument for social, political and or economic transformation in the mode of transformative constitutionalism. However, these same actors could not agree on the nature or the direction of the desire transformation. They also could not agree to disagree. They could not agree to kick down the road, the can down the road on some of the issues that divided them. So let us now very briefly examine the constitutional belief of each of these actors. The leftist activists and nationalists, including those of the Kefea movement, adhere to a vision of state directed change from the top that married well with transformative constitutionalism. The leftists were also connected to a network of global South South activism that held out South Africa and even India as exemplars of a move towards the realization of progressive social and economic rights through constitutionalism. Human rights activists with a leg in both the leftist and the liberal camps were predisposed to believing in a strong form of constitutionalism as well. That form of constitutionalism would act to protect rights and restrain the excesses of the executive. Liberals shared this civil libertarian creed. They were additionally believers in a sort of economic neoliberalism that wanted to limit the state to know more than the role of chief licensor and the regulator. The constitution was also the liberals instrument of choice to limit the state. So we have from the top to the liberals those who believe that the constitution should be sort of the tool of the state to lead societal change. And the liberals at the bottom or near the bottom thought that they could use the same constitution to limit the state. The liberals also had major doubts in their ability to compete in free and fair elections. Therefore they saw the constitution as a potential safety net where they can guarantee some of their political preferences and remove them from ordinary politics. Hence their calls for Al-Dustur Al-Walan, the constitution first. The Islamists, including Muslim Brotherhood members and various shades of Salafists who participated in the 2011 protests and who won the first parliamentary elections in 2011, adhered to a political Islam that reconciled itself with the forms of the modern state. So a constitution, tripartite separation of powers, some form of unicameral or bicameral legislature. But insofar as such a state can be governed by Islamic law or Sharia or at a minimum not contradicted. They thus believed in a constitution that expresses the supremacy of Islamic law in theory but also fulfills some sort of policing of what is or is not Islamic. Although they and we as academics may disagree on what effect if any such a constitution would have in practice in the context of the Egyptian state which is already far from secular, the Islamist aspirations that the constitution will lay in Islamic superstructure that can transform the existing civil law base towards a more Islamic style of legalism. Ironically in hindsight, all of these actors also believed in the Egyptian judiciary and they had very high hopes for it. Again, to each group its own reasons for that. The nationalists and leftists had achieved significant victories during the Mubarak years in administrative court cases trying to stop the government's moves to privatize the state-led economy. Although human rights activists in Islam has suffered many courtroom setbacks, the courts also handed them some few but important one would say landmark wins that kept them believing in the potential that the judiciary can still serve at times. A neutral arbiter, at least as compared to other state institutions during the Mubarak years. The Liberals held the constitutional court in high regard. It had championed what Tener Mostafa calls insurrated liberalism that was a significant departure from the status-nasurus legacy. Most importantly however, all of these political actors had supported the independent judges movement in 2005. A group of judges who took a stand against the rigging of the 2005 elections by the Mubarak state. There was thus an experience of solidarity with the judiciary that was hard to ignore among all of these actors. After all, many of them had yelled, Ya chwda, ya chwda, chwda, chalasun am y natura, o judges, o judges, riddys of the tyrants. We live in very, very different days now. So a final note on this crude political map is obviously it is missing some very, very influential actors like state actors, status Mubarak loyalists who had tremendous influence on the shape of the post 2011 order. But I don't claim that they had the same type of faith in constitutionalism that these revolutionary actors had. And that faith is the subject of my presentation. So in part because of these beliefs that we talked about together with the high hopes that each of these revolutionary actors had in the Egyptian judiciary, the political actors previously mentioned, raised in 2011 to clash over what to elevate beyond the arena of everyday political contestation. So they raised to constitutionalize, to raise certain political preferences above the political fray. But that was done before these same actors had even carved out or secured a proper space to actually practice ordinary politics. So they raised to constitutionalization, touched anything and everything. It was done by Hooker by Crook and prioritized battles over constitutional text. This over focus indeed one could say fetishization of constitutionalism came at the expense of battles on bread and butter issues, on disassembling the state's decades long monopoly over politics, and on how state institutions actually create and deploy power. In the sense all of the actors post 2011, even the Islamists who won the parliamentary elections had internalized the distrust of politics that was and still probably remains a hallmark of the Egyptian state. The most puzzling thing however is that from day one, while constitutional battles had a very high cost in terms of entrenching divisions and polarizing the country, it was never clear whether or how any textual victories resulting from these battles would become operative. To highlight but a few examples in chronological order. First in March 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt called for a popular referendum on 10 articles to amend the Mubarak era constitution. To pave the way for elections that would be followed by an effort to write a supposedly permanent constitution, a plan that the Islamists supported. While the 10 articles had ignited furious debate and division deepening the divide between Islamists and non-Islamists, the debates and divisions were rendered mute when the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces actually passed the constitutional declaration adding more than 50 articles to the ones approved in the popular referendum. Cherry picking which articles of the Mubarak era constitution to preserve which to omit and which to actually significantly rewrite again without submitting them to a popular vote. Six months later the Supreme Council again with Islamist support issued another constitutional declaration without submitting it to referendum, stipulating that two thirds of the parliamentary seats in the upcoming elections would be set aside for party lists and one third for individual candidates. The idea here was to elevate the new parliamentary election system to an unchallegable constitutional status. But here again, texts did not matter for long. The judiciary previously championed when such activism was directed against the state in the Mubarak years, continued its activism by striking down the first freely elected parliament on the basis that the same election system that was supposedly constitutionalized was unconstitutional. In its judgment the country's highest court relied on its past precedent more than any constitutional text. This was again the case when an administrative court of first instance, so court of first instance, in a ruling possibly without parallel in any other country, decided to dissolve the country's first constitutional assembly to draft a permanent constitution. Despite all these indicia that texts even a constitutional text did not magically self-execute nor did it really constrain many straight state actors, the Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist allies in 2012 still prioritized constitutional battles. They insisted on moving forward, not even punting, on the most divisive issues when it came to write a supposedly permanent constitution for the country. One could even say that the Islamist insistence on the composition of the second constitutional assembly and the wording of the 2012 constitution that this assembly produced galvanized their divided opposition into the block that paved the way for the overhaul of the entire order in June 2013. So what textual victories the Islamists achieved in 2012 only lasted for six months. Not to single out the Islamists for their constitutional faith, when liberals got the chance to influence the post-Mohammed Morsi transition in July 2013, their demand was yet again a lustura wadan or the constitution first. Even though it was not clear at all that any of their demands on civil liberties, on freedom, on any subject would be executed. We still have a draconian protest law that no court has ruled on constitutional despite the constitution supposedly guaranteeing the right to freedom of assembly. So I end here with a question for my SEMCO panellist for the Q&A session, which is how much does constitutionism really matter? I know I'm still a student and aspiring to have a job when I graduate, but I still want to reflect on the actual usefulness of the field I'm studying. And I will end with the thoughts of one of my professors, Adrian Vermeule, in his 2011 essay, Ideals and Idols, beyond some essential functions like rules that establish a minimum requirement of social order, and if a society is lucky, rules that can serve as focal points that help coordinate popular control of the government and prevent serious abuses. So beyond these two minimum social requirements, social order type of rules, it is unclear whether in countries after massive transformation or otherwise how much constitutional institutions can accomplish and anyone craving an object for their faith would do well to look elsewhere. Thank you. Thank you very much. So we now turn to Scott Newton for the discussion. Bacon, your indulgence, I'm going to exercise discussants prerogative and remain seated. Great. I'm supposed to do the tarot reading, right, and I'm lucky because Muhammad Nadia and Nadia have given me a great set of tarot cards, and I want to thank them for three very interesting provocative and complementary pieces on the utility applicability of constitutionalism and constitutionalist discourse in the circumstances of the extraordinary events of four years back. And I want to stop for a moment to gauge with you the extraordinaryness of those events because they were truly events in the sense of Badiou, that, right, contingent transformative eruptions of the sort which define politics by their very nature as supervenient, right, a welling up of constituent energies, a manifestation of people power or the pouvoir constituent, the power that constitutes in the first place. They were an amazing, synchronous series of acts of raw collective political will, and they took place in a region, the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East, which is perhaps unparalleled across the globe for on the one hand it's rich store of the resources of political modernity, sophisticated discourse and critical self-reflection, a diverse set of emancipatory strategies and concepts and ideologies all nourished by one of the world's great intellectual traditions. That's on the one hand, and on the other hand, notable for the systematic frustration or unparallel really, for the systematic frustration of the deployment of those same resources, frustration by authoritarian elites both secular and dynastic elites whose hold on power has been enabled and entrenched, we're not brought about in the first place by the supposed ffons at Argo of political modernity, the European West, right? So, revolution or activated constituent politics, as I prefer to think about it, made their determined march across the Maghreb to Egypt and the Levant and even beyond to the fringes of the peninsula because they had been forcibly kept out, so this was a moment of unshackling or constitutional derepression. All of which is to say that the Arab Spring followed perhaps the longest political winter in modern history and the specifically constitutional dimensions of its playing out notably in Egypt and Tunisia has presented us with developments both uplifting and heartbreaking or crushing, which cut right to the heart of the nature and dynamics of postmodern constitutions as indeed the nature of postmodern collective politics. Nothing could be more topical or compelling. In a way, the revolutions of 2011 were much more compelling than the revolutions of 1989, the canonical transition zone of the former states of the bloc. I'll come to those in a moment. Now, I want to place these papers in conversation with one another or highlight aspects of the conversation I think they were already having maybe in the tarot deck. From Muhammad's paper I want to draw on the very compelling correction or modification of Rawls to raise some hard questions about the loaded nature of transition and democratic transition in particular. From Nadja, I want to draw out the messiness and loudness and untidiness of constituent politics and processes. And from Hadaid, in her account of the overplotted Egyptian constitutional story, I want to address the ideological limitations and hegemonic status of constitutionalism itself. Muhammad did a brilliant job of reading Rawls' Confer Rawls. Yes, overlapping consensus cannot be assumed but must be achieved or laboriously constructed. And a modus vivendi rather than serving simply as a negative contrast is actually a very good platform on which to start building, not just an opportunity but the only way in. Rawls is very good at giving us a set of tools for evaluating the justice claims of any existing set of political arrangements but he's next to useless when it comes to designing one. But I don't just want to endorse pragmatism rather than theory as a recipe for dealing with concrete constituent challenges. Had a cobble together in tough and inhospitable times some defensible set of workable political institutions. Muhammad makes reference at multiple points to the democratic constitution and what he offers us, it seems to me is a strong brief for what Rudy Tytel called provisional constitutionalism. Make shift and make do arrangements subject to revision. We might even consider going Tytel one better and imagining instead of the constituent act which is sort of a one-off, a moment of creation rather than that a sustained period of sustained constituent action over some protracted indefinite period. But I have to confess to a deep allergy and typathy aversion even to the use of the term transition which grows out of my own experience in the transition zone of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And especially to its use, the use of the word transition in tandem with democracy, democratic transition. The problem is that the word smuddles in a linear trajectory and a linear sequence with fixed start and endpoints and stages along the way. The transition is always from something regressive to something progressive from the immature to the mature from the less to the more developed. Moreover it connotes an accelerated or facilitated movement along a trajectory or a path that others have trod and completed much earlier. So transition is always done by the belated or the deferred or the detained or the retarded. It is never open-ended. So no one ever dares to talk about the Bolshevik transition for instance as a transition. And the oddness of that usage I think which I hope registers will convey in what sense I mean that the term transition has become loaded. But for political thought if not for constitutionalism democracy is a project not an existing or achieved system to model oneself after or measure oneself again. I'm not saying the fact that in the 90s the Office of Democratic Transition of the United States Agency for International Development was advertising itself as a one-stop democracy shop. And viewing Egyptian or Tunisian society as requiring a period of tutelage and accommodating pluralism makes me uncomfortable even if political sociologists were to convince me of some demonstrable basis for the argument. When I hear arguments about unrightness or unreadiness for constitutional politics or democracy I'm suspicious and wary. When queried what he thought of western civilization Gandhi said well it would be a good idea. So similarly I think democracy and constitutionalism are a good idea but they are nowhere realized or instantiated. So Egypt and Tunisia might be better viewed not as making the transition to democracy and approaching or reaching a destination to join the other's long layer but rather as embracing a project of democracy which will lead them in no necessarily discernible much less already traveled direction to Nadja. Three cheers from messy, loud and unpredictable that's what constituent politics should be. I know for demystifying and demythologizing both are constituting in the first place and what gets constituted. And I'm sure the American framers, the canonical framers were pretty messy, loud and unpredictable even as they went about framing. By the way I think framers and constitutions should always be lower case and political contestation over the meta rules the design of the institutions and procedures regulating collective decision making and preference formation should if anything be even messier and louder than the constant contestation over ordinary rules and their application. Which doesn't mean it should reduce the horse trading and log rolling of the rotten compromise sort and power sharing deal. Constituent processes should be contestatory not just deliberative but about institutional design and procedural provisions as signifying more than simple proxies for political interest. The problem is that institutional design issues remain the province of technicians and specialists rather than ordinary people. Some of you may know that we've had that rarest of things here in the UK a few years back, a constitutional referendum. It was the price that Tories paid to the Lib Dems for the coalition along with offices for Vince Cable and Nick Clay. It was a referendum on AV alternative voting which would have represented some modest marginal tinkering with the meta rules of representation here in the UK and it was met with a huge yawn from the electorate and much bad faith coverage from the political class and the media. A political conversation about institutional design about the democratic meta rules was perceived as obstrucin baffling as technical and political and that was here in the UK. I'm a pragantist and I acknowledge the necessity of starting from a modus revendi and seeking a deep and avoiding a rotten compromise but I don't want to sell idealism short. I think idealism or rather ideas and ideals are crucial if a practice of radical constitutionalism is ever to emerge and that's much wider than the Rosian notion and here's where I want to close by finding some way of placing into productive dialectical relationship the ideas of radical democracy on the one hand and constitutionalist on the other and that brings me to her diet. Yes, it is striking and puzzling how many Egyptian legal and political actors remain committed to constitutionalism, constitutional argument, constitutional adjudication in the teeth of bitter serial disappointment but their commitments are no more mystifying than the shared commitments of constitutionalists and constitutional activists elsewhere in less embittering and disappointing circumstances. How is it that the domain of objectivity of constitutionalism the things they talk and write about and worry about remain so very limited? Does the universe of possible or imaginable design of representative institutions or collective decision making really reduce to the handful of worn concepts and the very limited field of choice to which we've all become habituated bicameralism versus unicameralism, PR versus first pass the post or AV, presidential versus parliamentary versus mixed, unitary versus federal and must constitutional scholarship remain disproportionately preoccupied with a few perennial chestnuts like the countermajoritarian role of courts? Where in contemporary constitutionalism is the astonishing breadth and richness of the radical political imagination? Why does a formalist legalist posture continue to exercise such hegemonic effects? After 200 years of revolutionary constitutionalism no one has succeeded in telling us how to constitutionalize revolutions or how to revolutionize constitutions and constitution making. To sustain the energies and imagination of the constituent moment across the act of constituting itself. To bridge the abyss between ne prouvar constituant and ne prouvar constitué, people power and state authority which remains the abiding scandal of constitutionalism. And that gulf is reflected in the disciplinary gulf between constitutionalism on the one hand and radical democratic and political theory on the other. So the question I want to leave with you with which is sort of a corollary to Hediad's question is a different set of commitments and an alternative approach to constitutionalism possible or imaginable for Egyptians, yes certainly but for their colleagues elsewhere. Can constitutionalism be reinvented rather than discarded after this latest round of chasening and sobering checks and defeats? Can we jettison this particular constitutionalist ideology and not renounce the constituent project altogether of framing democratic representative government? The Arab Spring is perhaps the most powerful recent demonstration not just a popular discontent or the limits of the patience of the governed with their governors but of the force of the prouvar constituant which cannot be treated in a preambular and formulaic way as we the people but has to be regarded as the generative matrix of the configuration and forms of public authority. So whether we regard the Arab Spring in the seasonal or fluvial sense in Matthew's exegesis we should still be warmed or irrigated by it because we would not be at this historical conjunction without it and it is important to remind us all here that it is not a regional phenomenon it is not a phenomenon of regional significance but of human political significance. Thank you very much. Yes, now we will have to cut down the question time to ten minutes. I mean we started late already but I mean I don't want us to make the tea break. So questions? One? Any others? Two? Oh that's good. Three, so that's fine. Samia please. Thank you very much. Thank you for a really interesting set of presentations. I just had a brief question actually to all of you but specifically to Professor Fadal. In terms of the critiques and drawing upon what Scott just said in terms of the critiques of political liberalism and constitutionalism there has been moves by some constitutional feminist scholars to try and make sure the whole constituency I know we are looking at gender later but in terms of women's voices to advocate the introduction of parity governance or democratic models because actually the whole critique in terms of roles and overlapping consensus also needs to really interrogate issues right of voice authority power whose voice gets heard in these political parties in terms of the consensus and differences often in its men. So there has been some work done now by feminist scholars looking at parity democracy models and I know in Scotland and various other places they are looking at this in terms of the introduction. So I just wondered what your thoughts were on that. I need to be educated on it and I am not really familiar with this model so maybe we can talk at the break and I can learn some more. Okay. Two here. The discussion reminded me of a quote by John Llyw once he was asked what do you think of the French Revolution he said it's too early to tell and I think we have when we're thinking about constitutionalism what strikes me from a perspective of revolutions is that actually what's being fought over is not the constitution per se I mean the other day I was looking at the Kuwaiti constitution of 38 there was a big revolutionary process at the time in contestation between the ruler and the people who were fighting against him they were demanding a constitution and they brought in the draft of the Iraqi royalist constitution because they thought it would reduce the power of the ruler as much as possible and give more power for the constitutive assembly and he was like no I want the transjordan one so it wasn't even a debate over the actual clauses or they weren't even drafting the clauses it's like a discussion that gives me the most amount of power my question is for Hediat do you think this is actually what's happening in Egypt it's about power distribution you seem to indicate that or is it actually a substantive discussion over normative issues thank you for your question I actually do think it has elements of both it is primarily a power distribution question and hence the idea of a constitution being a map of whatever the current set-up of power is but what I've tried to make clear is that there is also this belief and it's probably new I wouldn't say it exists in the 1930s possibly anywhere that the constitution itself can lead to transformation so that is the extra thing I think that many many many actors that participated in the 2011 revolution believed in I don't think it's unique to Egypt I think it probably resonates with a lot of the sort of changes elsewhere in the world in the global south in particular but this idea that the text itself can sort of set in motion something together with an alliance sort of with an activist judiciary that is actually transformative which I don't think existed in the 1930s we didn't really have the type of judicial review that people who hold that faith in constitutionalism believe in today so that would be the modification I would do and in terms of sort of where the ideas are coming from I totally agree I mean in Egypt as in elsewhere it's not always that the ideas are organic but are actively sort of people are googling even parliamentarians and people in the constitutional assembly like sometimes too embarrassing very very embarrassing and in terms of like literally copying and pasting from different countries Thank you very much Fawr I was interested in the use of roles to kind of set up the kind of discussion for today but it seems to me that in the like taking the case of Egypt was the one that I sort of know the best that in Egypt actually today we don't find either a case of kind of a constitution of overlapping consensus nor a constitution of modus vivendi actually this kind of pre-constitutional we have a constitution but we have this really kind of pre-constitutional politics where the Professor Fadla as you described where one set of political forces is actually trying to eliminate its rivals so my question is actually for the whole for the whole panel although it's kind of framed by my understanding of Egypt which I know a bit better than the other cases but I mean what is the constitution of Egypt doing it's not really a role in constitution so I would like to hear some thoughts on what it actually is I mean who is it enabling who is it actually constraining what would the politics in Egypt look like if the constitution were to vanish you know tomorrow would it be actually any different Well I have a very strong opinions about it I think it's a constitution of the state against the people you could sort of look at that by the opposition of the 2013 assembly that was revising the 2012 constitution it was populated mainly by state actors and I think one of the big distinctions between it and 2013 was that in 2013 and I hear I will just disagree a little bit with Hedayat the 2012 constitution in theory it could have transformed society in an Islamic way but the ability to do so would have had been channeled through the parliament so it couldn't be triggered in a top down judicial fashion whereas in 2013 all the really fundamental security provisions are self executing and can be delegated to the judiciary so it does actually distribute power in a very decisive way to the judiciary particularly with respect to terrorism and national security and gives courts direct power to sort of implement all these things so it is very much of a state against the people of the situation if you took it away I think you'd have the same thing of a colleague of mine called Egypt a Potemkin's village of legality and I think that's what finds it so puzzling the fetishization of the constitution but I don't think you would need the constitution to do that you could do everything that's being done through emergency decree which was essential was going on anyway after Mubarak resigned but there's the desire to make it look like it's law without any content of law very briefly I think if you would take away the current constitution you probably have the same balance of powers but partly because I think that the current constitution doesn't have as much transformation or aspirations as any of the prior 2011 aspirations anything comparable to the to the post 2011 aspirations but just to comment on Professor Fadl I would just agree with the formulation on whether the 2012 constitution which is a very academic discussion since it, as I mentioned it never really got more than six months test that it empowered parliament about police what is or is not Islamic because I think the text of the constitution was supposed to delegate this to a group of scholars not parliament to tell us what sort of at least on some controversial issues of what Sharia means etc group of scholars feeds in to the constitutional court and then the constitutional court somehow produces a policing of what is Islamic or is not but it is an academic conversation thank you well thank you very much I hope we have had a very enlightening session where constitutionalism is a good idea but the truth is the Arab Spring countries are still really much engrossed with how to manic diversity in their respective nation states to build institutions that are inclusive consolidate political harmony and stability and avoid conflict so hopefully constitutionalism can help to achieve that and rule of law which will be here in the next session please join me in giving a round of applause to the panel