Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
* Head, Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. The author is grateful for the substantial input from Iginio Gagliardone, University of Oxford.
INTRODUCTION
The legitimacy of constitutions, which may reflect their content as much as the process by which they were drafted and the capacity to implement them, is a contentious issue for societies emerging from violent conflict. The very process of drafting a constitution can be divisive and threaten weak coalitions and unsteady alliances while emboldening critics. While the role of constitution-making in post-war state-building has received significant attention1, the ways in which governments, and their allies, attempt to "sell" or communicate a constitution to a conflict-affected population are often overlooked. This article will explore and analyse this process in Ethiopia under the government led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). While the case of Ethiopia is unique in the scale and ambition of how the government has attempted to use the constitution fundamentally to restructure the state and re-define the nation through ethnic federalism, it is also instructive for the challenges it raises of communicating a constitution in a post-war environment. The article examines the media's role in the constitution-making process in three areas: legitimacy, negotiation and implementation, which are each discussed in turn.
After more than 20 years of guerrilla struggle in northern Ethiopia, the EPRDF seized power in 1991, ousting the Soviet-backed Derg regime.2Establishing the legitimacy to govern was a major challenge. Despite efforts to change its image, the EPRDF had largely been regarded as a party that reflected the interests of a specific political formation that had been leading the struggle against the Derg: the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), an ethnic insurgency rooted in the northern region of Tigray. At the time the EPRDF came to power, Tigrayans were a small minority, comprising approximately 6 per cent of the population.3Since the EPRDF seized control of the state by force, it had a legitimacy problem in the eyes of both a domestic population that had growing expectations of participation and accountability, and the international community that was encouraging democratic standards. The EPRDF approached the media, in particular the...