Data for: Burundi: The Search for Constitutional Peace

This is an Annotation for Transparent… data project.

The annotated article can be viewed on the publisher's website.

In August of 2000, after the intervention of international mediators, the Government of Burundi and 17 political parties signed the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi with a constitution finally being signed in 2005. Burundi’s iterative cycles of ethnic violence and the underlying mistrust between the minority Tutsi, which controlled the military, and the majority Hutu are the backdrop on which the constitutional process was set. The entire process, based on the Peace of Arusha, was plagued by anxiety and insecurity, and the country to this day has not managed to find stable footing. From the debates over parliamentary apportionment to more recent struggles of the CNDD-FDD party to erase or rewrite the agreements made at Arusha, questions remain over the constitution’s initial intentions as well as its future.