Expanding the Universe of Comparative Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia

14(1) Journal of Comparative Law 46-55 (2019)

https://www.jicl.org.uk/storage/journals/November2020/gZQfm5XqfnSkWPsfTmGb.pd

This introductory article to a special issue on Constitutional Amendment in Southeast Asia centres the region as an essential, yet often overlooked, site for understanding constitutional amendment and constitutional change more broadly. Whereas most comparative constitutional scholarship has focused on established liberal democracies, this collection turns to a region where constitutions are relatively young, frequently amended, and deeply shaped by postcolonial legacies, political transitions, and contested democratic practices. By highlighting how amendment processes in Southeast Asia have been used both to entrench power and to create new mechanisms of accountability, the introduction underscores the dual constructive and destructive capacities of amendment. It also situates these country studies within broader theoretical debates about constitutional rigidity, foundationalism, and the limits of amendment power, thereby showing how Southeast Asian experiences not only fill a gap in the literature but also challenge dominant assumptions in the field. In doing so, the introduction demonstrates how regional perspectives can enrich and recalibrate global constitutional theory by offering bottom-up insights that complicate prevailing models and expand the universe of comparative constitutional analysis