APPLICATION: SECTORAL AND THEMATIC SPOTLIGHTS 71
it can be perceived to be acting in a one-sided manner. The institution has begun to focus on civil capacity along with its focus on citizen engagement, albeit the record here is mixed (World Bank 2018). However, its resourcing for civil society institutions remains so small4 that it could continue to be seen as working only through one side of the social contract.
African Protests and Reshaping the Social Contract Protests are an important bargaining mechanism through which large groups of citizens can demonstrate their political weight, and 2019 has been referred to as the year of global street protests and mass demonstrations (Rachman 2019). In their geographical coverage, the protests were unrivaled in scope and variety, with comparisons often made to 1989 and even to the waves of insurgency in 1948. Typically seen as cases of “insurgent” or “street” citizenship (Giugni and Grasso 2019; Holston 2009), the protests were on a scale capable of radically disrupting daily life and inducing panic measures from governments as far afield as Algeria; Bolivia; Chile; Colombia; the Czech Republic; Ecuador; France; Hong Kong SAR, China; India; Iraq; the Islamic Republic of Iran; Lebanon; Malta; the Russian Federation; Spain; and Sudan (Brannen, Haig, and Schmidt 2020). Popular mobilization across such disparate locations, coupled with their variety of political repertoires, goals, and forms of organization, defy easy generalization. But their impact is not in question. Street protests and strikes saw Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, forced from office in November 2019 after 13 years in power, and presidents Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Omar al-Bashir of Sudan both fell in April 2019 after decades in office. Africa was no exception to the global pattern of protests, and in many respects, demonstrations there proliferated more quickly and more widely than in other regions. In 2019, there were 10,793 demonstrations in Africa according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, compared with 819 in 2009.5 This growth did not come out of nowhere—Africa witnessed the largest increase in antigovernment protests in the world in the decade since 2010, increasing by 23.8 percent each year (more than twice the global average) and increasing by 746 percent over the decade (Brannen, Haig, and Schmidt 2020). Armed violence and fatalities increased in Africa after 2010, largely accounted for by insurgencies in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan (though decreasing since 2014 as part of a longer term downward trend). The number of fatalities per protest, however, has declined steadily from 2001, from nine per event to fewer than three (Ciliers 2018). During earlier waves of protests, demonstrations typically endured for days or weeks, but in recent cases, in Guinea, Malawi, Sudan, and Togo, for example,
