Professor Cynthia Barrow-Giles

Publication/source: New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 99 (3-4), 427-428, 2025

Description / abstract: The political biography provides a more empathetic portrayal of Burnham, especially the domestic sacrifices that political leadership demanded, and his incursion into the labor movement and community-based politics. These, Lewis links inexorably to the cultivation of a political leader who though not altogether ambivalent about his domestic responsibilities, and his personal life, nonetheless was committed to national politics above everything else. The biography links these and others, including his sojourn overseas and his contacts with nascent radical leaders at home and across the developing world and elsewhere to the consequential impact of his leadership not just on the immediate pre-and postindependence period to the first two decades of independence but also on present-day Guyana and its inability to forge national unity into the first three decades of the twenty-first century. These intimate insights into …

Publication/source: Social and Economic Studies 72 (1/2), 10-37, 2023

Description / abstract: Over two decades after the Forde Constitutional Reform Commission recommended a transition to a republic, Barbados transitioned swiftly to a republic in the wake of the government's declaration during the Throne Speech that Barbados would become a republic on 30 November 2021. This transition reverberated across the Caribbean, setting a precedent for the remaining constitutional monarchies to follow suit. The transition must be understood within the context of a special historical, constitutional, and political moment that is not uniformly replicated everywhere in the Commonwealth Caribbean. We contend that the different politico-constitutional contexts hold the distinct possibility that the remaining monarchies may experience politico-constitutional challenges in effecting the transition. We explore the unique historical and political circumstances leading to the republican transition in Barbados, contrasting …

Publication/source: King's Law Journal 34 (2), 215-237, 2023

Description / abstract: The use of referendums to address political issues and at times crises, by allowing the people or the plebiscite to vote on a matter as a form of direct democracy, has increased in modern polities, in what Tierney describes as a ‘Constitutional moment’. 1 Referendums can act as stand-ins for elected legislatures, provide checks on the legislature, amend constitutions, establish new states, make new sub-states as acts of devolution, and transfer power from states to international organizations. 2 They can constrain or acclaim executive power as Dicey 3 and Schmitt, 4 respectively, purports. 5 While the

Publication/source: The Round Table 112 (4), 438-439, 2023

Description / abstract: For more than eight decades, power struggles between the two major ethnic groups in the bipolar state of Guyana, have been a dominant force in the political life of the nation. While it has often taken the form of legally contested elections, post-election violence has also been an outstanding feature of the political landscape of the country. Despite the post-1997 electoral and constitutional reforms in Guyana, rarely have the losers of an election not alleged voter fraud. Elections are steeped in controversy, with the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) often enmeshed. But the imbroglio of the March 2020 regional and general elections will remain by far the most controversial, with the aborted final tabulation of the vote, questionable decisions by the Chief Elections Officer and other election officials, and the refusal of the incumbent administration to accept defeat, setting the stage for extended legal battles and …

Publication/source: ConstitutionNet, 2022

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