Administrative Law Reform and Legal Integration in Hybrid Political Regimes

This 48-month project, entailing international collaboration between Lund University and the University of Manchester, will produce a new framework for interpreting processes of constitutional legitimation in hybrid political regimes. It analyses two constitutional orders in the former Soviet sphere of influence, in Tatarstan and Uzbekistan.

These constitutional orders are representative examples of an increasingly frequent type of hybrid constitutionalism.

This type is marked by the fact that: (1) it provides relatively strong guarantees for access to law; for claims against administrative agencies; and for protecting individual rights against violation by public bodies; (2) it does not provide strong mechanisms for competitive democracy or for rotation of governmental office.

Consequently, responsibility for the construction of recognition for law and of legitimacy for the polity as a whole is partly displaced into legal institutions.Such constitutions are usually dismissed as simply authoritarian.

However, this project promotes an ethnographic approach to examine how these constitutions produce legitimacy in their societal contexts: that is, how they contribute to societal cohesion, how social actors engage with them, and why political institutions depend upon them.The project is very timely.

Most states now have hybrid constitutions.

An understanding of ways in which they stabilize government is vital for our comprehension of global law and global politics.