The consolidation of peace, its promotion or the creation of a threat to peace – all these are the results of political decisions made by states. The constitutions of states, being the most politicized normative legal acts, play an important role in establishing the framework for making such decisions and their legitimacy. It is the constitutions that establish the fundamental principles and norms of the separation of power and its functioning, the foundations of the state structure and political regime, the basic rights and freedoms of citizens, including the right to peace and the guarantees of upholding it. They influence the world and allow society to judge the degree of the state’s potential for peace. Thus, the constitutions of Argentina, Italy, Cambodia, Colombia, Lithuania, Portugal, Russia, the USA, France, Japan, etc. declare peace, the right to peace, and security as the foundations of the world order, while the basic laws of Hungary, China, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia, etc. define peace as a fundamental value and a goal of their development. From the point of view of the author of the article, Immanuel Kant's theory of constitutions as a prerequisite for peace, set forth in the treatise «Towards Eternal Peace», remains today an ideal vision of the future and allows to bring this future of the world closer through constitutions, albeit with different approaches demonstrated in the texts of modern constitutions and, in practice, in states governed by rule of law. The article reveals the traditional approach to ensuring peace in the first constitutions of states at the end of the XVIII and XIX centuries, for which an important constitutional achievement was ensuring internal peace in the state, limiting the ways of violating peace, as well as the features of «peaceful constitutions» adopted after World War II. In the basic laws of modern States, the issue of maintaining and strengthening international peace and security, ensuring peaceful coexistence of States and peoples has been and remains central.
constitution; peace; I. Kant; theory of «eternal peace»; human rights; human dignity; the right to peace.