The Place of Indigenous Institutions in Constitutional Order

The failure of the state in Africa and elsewhere, and its attendant conflict, is rooted in the lack of correspondence between indigenous institutions and the formal structures of the state. Indigenous institutions, as have variously evolved, represent sets of practices and expectations that can be distinctive to problems of collective action faced by groups of individuals in their own exigent circumstances. By developing a community of understanding tuned to these circumstances, they provide the rules and grammar within which individuals perceive their actions and those of others. They thus each represent a facility within which a person can use his or her knowledge of time and place and his or her understanding of others in the group in resolving collective action problems. In order to overcome the pathologies of state failure, societies should be constituted with reference to these indigenous political resources. As such, constitutional rules should both link such systems of collective action and set out the terms by which they develop.