Writing a Constitution - state-building exercise
Prior to this exercise, students have been reading selections from the such thinkers related to the rise of economic and political liberalism and nationalism as Adam Smith, John Locke, David Ricardo, Ernest Renan, and Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Benedict Anderson.
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Welcome to our state-building exercise.
Since the late eighteenth century, societies across the globe have formed nation-states. In the process, the various groups of people developed national identities - often imperfect - and crafted Constitutions to give institutional weight and guarantees of rights to the inhabitants in those territories. In this exercise, students will act as various groups of people that now represent the newly independent nation of Trapalanda. Students are broken into four discrete groups representing four provinces that now form this new country, namely the Coastal Plains, the Interior Lowlands, the Great Plains, and the Mountain provinces. |