54 SOCIAL CONTRACTS FOR DEVELOPMENT
political and security landscape in Somalia: (1) the bargain between international partners and the federal government, which results in both dependency and detachment from the citizenry; (2) the negotiated two-level bargain between the central government and local strongmen, which intervenes in the relationship between the state and the citizenry; and (3) the coercive relationship between the violent insurgent group al-Shabaab and the citizenry, which exists parallel to the deals struck with the government and local strongmen. Most alarmingly, while the official government struggles to establish a direct protection-taxation relationship with its citizens, al-Shabaab has successfully developed its own coercive deal. Across large swaths of the countryside, the insurgency has developed strategies to directly tax citizens across clan lines and to enforce their rule over these populations. Although their methods are extraordinarily abusive, the fact remains that these insurgents have forged a type of protection-taxation relationship that resembles a rudimentary social contract between citizen and state. While the official government has been unable to forge a direct deal with its citizens, al-Shabaab has learned how to effectively tax and govern local populations. Why then has al-Shabaab had greater success in establishing direct protection and taxation across clan lines while the Somali government has not been able to provide a viable social contract with its citizens? An examination of the fragmentation of the social contract and an effort to model bargains as multiple and competing protection-extortion rackets show that these deals have created perverse incentives that encourage powerholders to behave in ways that undermine true state consolidation. International support for the Somali state has inadvertently encouraged these perverse processes and thus made it more difficult to create a normal social contract between state and citizen.
South Africa: A Dynamic Social Contract South Africa’s political transition is arguably one of the most remarkable in history, but its evolution to an inclusive, prosperous society is still in process (World Bank 2018a). The fragility of the social contract is seen as a symptom of an “incomplete transition.” When many citizens are excluded from job opportunities and, hence, from joining the middle class, significant pressure is put on the social contract. The case study (Watts 2018b) starts with understanding apartheid as a form of social contract predicated on an institutionalized form of racial exclusion, oppression, and inequality. Over the course of the twentieth century, the components of that contract were renegotiated around class and ethnic tensions within the white population as well as the changing strategies of coercion and consent with respect to the black and “colored” populations. The collapse of
