52 SOCIAL CONTRACTS FOR DEVELOPMENT
absence of comprehensive social welfare and public goods (education, health, social protection, infrastructure).
Senegal: Collaboration across Actors for a Stable Social Contract Senegal is the only country in continental West Africa that has never experienced a coup d’état and it has enjoyed expanding democratic freedoms since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1976. Domestically, the traditional form of Sufi Islam has “provided for a substantial social stability, strong cultural identity and laid the foundations for inter-confessional and inter-ethnical harmony” (World Bank 2018b, 9). The case study (Konte 2019) examines this sustained stability by using the social contract lens to analyze four issues that are particularly relevant for Senegal: (1) the role of Sufi modernism in the plurality of the social contract, (2) citizen participation and engagement, (3) inequality and the inclusion of the youth, and (4) the Islamo-Wolof model of the social contract. The case study observes that the social contract functions as a system for the exchange of services in which the state and Sufi orders, even though apparently situated in different sociopolitical spaces, collaborate in preserving peace and stability. The success of this system largely rests on the capacity of the brotherhoods’ leaders to maintain their credibility in the eyes of the population by keeping their distance from those in power to play the role of spokespersons for the voiceless and function as safety valves in times of crisis. The Muridiyya6 is considered the most important cog in the social contract machine. Support of the Murid sheikhs, regarded as the sole truly legitimate leaders by a sizable segment of the population, is indispensable to ensuring civil peace and the implementation of government projects, particularly the unpopular ones. The status of the Murid sheikhs also connects to the Islamo-Wolof model, which is composed of the political, social, and cultural arrangements (infrastructure and ideologies) that have been both supporting the operations of the colonial and the postcolonial states and providing the sources and resources for the legitimacy of their power. The Islamo-Wolof model binds the state and the brotherhoods in a complex web of social, cultural, economic, and political relationships. It covers the whole social field and, moreover, guarantees the hegemony of a modernity that is Wolof-inspired and driven, both at the ideological level and at the social level in the public sphere. Regarding the civil capacity side of the social contract, the case study observes that citizens in Senegal do not face many constraints to political participation, but the centralization of power in the executive branch at the expense of the legislative and judiciary branches and of local governments
