Normative Aspects of Social Contracts: The Case of Human Rights

about rescuing South Africa (LeBas 2013; Riedl 2014), these protests arguably were instrumental in resisting the decay in the country’s social contract.

There is no ready-made template of prescriptive policy measures that can be derived from Africa’s growing role in the rise of global protests and mass demonstration. Ultimately, what is key is the extent to which protests are linked to or contribute to opposition parties or more extensive forms of institutionalized politics capable of not only advancing democracy (LeBas 2013; Riedl 2014) but also of enhancing state responsiveness and state capabilities, and therefore state legitimacy, which is at the heart of the social contract. It is not easy to predict which protests are likely to succeed in doing so. If much of the research on the third-wave protests is correct, then the significance of cross-class and crossgenerational alliances and the intersection of middle-class leadership under conditions of limited upward mobility (economic pessimism) can help identify conditions under which sustained popular mobilization might occur. Synergies between communities and local or provincial government have also proven generative, for example, the community protests for better local government service provision in South Africa.

Normative Aspects of Social Contracts: The Case of Human Rights12

Citizen-state relations, viewed through the prism of the social contract, invariably invoke the human rights construct as the enabling framework. In the midst of the multiplicity of influences that contribute to the shaping of social contracts in the African context, including the prevalent characteristics of sociocultural variance, developmental asymmetry, and legal pluralism, the human rights paradigm presents a constant pillar for both benchmarking and assessing the progress of the state in addressing the welfare of the governed. Human rights enter the social contract framework mainly through the responsiveness outcome because many of the fundamental rights concern freedom of expression and protection from violent repression such as torture and political killings.

Human rights have an important normative component (Bentley 2019). As Ozar explains, “when we say someone has a right of some sort, we are … talking about what ought or ought not to be done. Rights talk is one kind of moral discourse. It is used to inform people of their obligations and to give explanations of our own and others’ choices and actions” (Ozar 1986, 4). Based on this definition, all human rights would then have some normative element to them. They are not necessarily about what empirically is; they are about what morally ought to be. It is important to bear this in mind when discussing human rights generally, but in Africa in particular, where the gap between the rights that are declared and their realization in practice can seem impossibly daunting.