The future of human rights in Africa will not be secured by defending yesterday’s institutions alone. It requires reimagining the relationship between rights, democracy, dignity, and the everyday aspirations of citizens.
There is a fundamental question confronting the human rights movement in Africa today: How do we defend human rights in societies where many citizens increasingly question whether democracy, constitutionalism, and the institutions established to protect their rights are delivering meaningful improvements in their lives? This question is particularly urgent in West and Central Africa, where democratic aspirations coexist with military interventions, constitutional controversies, violent extremism, economic exclusion, and growing pressures on civic freedoms. Yet these same regions are also home to extraordinary traditions of civic resistance, community solidarity, constitutional activism, women’s leadership, and youth mobilisation.
The recent convening on the future of human rights in West and Central Africa provides an important opportunity to reflect on these contradictions. Beyond the immediate challenges confronting human rights defenders, it invites us to interrogate the assumptions, approaches, and institutional arrangements that have shaped human rights work over the past three decades.
Our central argument is that the future of human rights and the future of democracy in Africa are inseparable. But their relationship must be understood more expansively than the defence of elections, constitutions, and formal institutions. Human rights must become meaningful in the everyday experiences of citizens, while democracy must be judged not only by how leaders acquire power but also by how power is exercised, whose interests it serves, and whether it advances human dignity. It is a warning the Nigerian political economist Claude Ake issued a generation ago: a democracy reduced to periodic elections, he argued, risks becoming the democratisation of disempowerment; a ritual of voting that leaves intact the structures that keep people poor, insecure and voiceless. It is echoed in the Indian jurist Upendra Baxi’s insistence that the legitimacy of human rights is measured not by the elegance of our norms but by their capacity to answer human suffering.
The crisis is not only democratic regression. It is also a crisis of relevance.
Across West and Central Africa, the democratic transitions of the 1990s generated considerable optimism. Multiparty elections returned, constitutions were rewritten, civil society expanded, and regional institutions developed increasingly ambitious frameworks for democratic governance and human rights.
These were important achievements. They created opportunities for participation, strengthened normative commitments, and established institutional foundations for challenging abuses of power. Yet political liberalisation did not consistently produce economic transformation, social inclusion, or responsive governance. For many citizens, the promise of democracy has remained distant from the realities of unemployment, insecurity, inadequate public services, corruption, and unequal access to opportunities. This disconnect has profound implications for human rights.
Ake saw the danger clearly. Because the colonial and post-colonial state remained the principal route to wealth and security, he observed, the struggle to control it turned politics into a form of warfare; multiplying parties without transforming that state would produce elections everywhere and popular power nowhere. The legal scholar Amy Chua sounded a complementary alarm in World on Fire: exporting free markets and overnight elections together into deeply unequal societies, without redistribution or social protection, can convert economic grievance into communal resentment and make democratic politics the arena in which that resentment is organised. Both warnings have aged well in West and Central Africa, where liberalisation of the ballot and of the market arrived together, and where too many citizens experienced both as systems rigged for others.
When rights are presented primarily as legal guarantees, procedural protections, or international obligations, without sufficient attention to the material conditions that make their enjoyment possible, they risk appearing disconnected from the daily struggles of ordinary people.
A young person who can vote but cannot find dignified employment may question the value of political participation. A woman whose constitutional equality is guaranteed but whose economic opportunities and physical safety remain constrained experiences a democracy that is incomplete. A rural community living with persistent insecurity may struggle to reconcile the language of citizenship with the absence of effective state protection. These experiences do not diminish the importance of civil and political rights. Rather, they demonstrate why such rights must be understood alongside economic, social, cultural, and collective rights. The challenge is not to replace one category of rights with another but to recover their indivisibility. Baxi’s formulation remains the sharpest test available: the foundations of human rights lie not in abstract theories of human nature but in concrete histories of human suffering. Rights that do not answer suffering will not command allegiance.
When the state becomes both protector and source of insecurity
The relationship between citizens and the state is undergoing significant strain. In parts of the Sahel, military authorities have justified extraordinary restrictions on political participation and civic freedoms by invoking national security and sovereignty. Elsewhere, civilian governments have faced criticism over restrictions on dissent, disputed constitutional arrangements, and the conduct of security institutions. Meanwhile, violent extremist groups, armed movements, criminal networks, and other non-state actors continue to threaten communities and undermine the protection of civilians.
These developments expose a central dilemma: the state is expected to guarantee human rights, yet its institutions may themselves contribute to violations, exclusion, or insecurity. This is not an argument for weakening the state. On the contrary, effective and legitimate public institutions remain essential to the protection of rights. But state authority cannot be treated as an end in itself. Its legitimacy must rest on accountability, public trust, and the protection of the people it exists to serve. Nor should the understandable demand for security become a justification for indefinitely suspending freedoms.
These dilemmas have deep historical roots. Ranajit Guha, the founding historian of Subaltern Studies, described colonial power as dominance without hegemony: rule sustained by coercion rather than consent. Too many post-colonial states inherited that grammar of rule. Where the state’s default relationship with society is domination, security easily becomes a language of repression, and citizenship remains thin in practice. Partha Chatterjee, writing in the same tradition, adds that beyond the enclaves of formal civil society, most people encounter the state not as rights-bearing citizens but as populations to be managed — negotiating survival through brokers, customary authorities and informal arrangements in what he calls political society. Human rights practice that speaks only the language of courtrooms and constitutions will struggle to reach them.
Security and human rights are not competing objectives. Sustainable security depends on justice, inclusion, institutional legitimacy, and meaningful relationships between communities and public authorities. Where governments respond to insecurity primarily through coercion, without addressing the grievances that sustain conflict, they risk reproducing the conditions that undermine their own legitimacy. The future of human rights therefore requires stronger engagement with the political economy of insecurity, the governance of security institutions, and the lived experiences of communities at the margins of state protection.
Human rights cannot remain the language of institutions alone
One of the most consequential questions for the human rights movement concerns who defines its priorities, speaks in its name, and determines its strategies. Africa has a rich history of struggles for dignity, justice, freedom, and collective self-determination. These struggles predate contemporary international human rights institutions and cannot be reduced to frameworks imported from elsewhere.
From anti-colonial movements to campaigns against military rule, from women’s organising to community struggles over land and natural resources, African societies have continually articulated their own understandings of rights and justice. Yet human rights practice can become overly professionalised, urban-centred and donor-driven, with accountability flowing upwards to funders rather than outwards to communities. This is also a question of the movement’s own legitimacy and ownership. These approaches have achieved important results and remain necessary. But they are insufficient when disconnected from the communities whose rights they seek to protect. The question is not whether international human rights standards remain relevant. Their universality remains essential, particularly when governments invoke cultural relativism or sovereignty to evade accountability.
Issa Shivji has been among the most unsparing critics of this drift. Human rights in Africa, he reminds us, were forged in popular struggles against slavery, colonialism and dictatorship; when the discourse is professionalised, projectised and donor-funded, it risks being converted from a weapon of the oppressed into an ideology administered over their heads; one fluent in the vocabulary of accountability yet silent about the political economy that produces violation. Shivji’s conclusion is not that rights are a foreign imposition to be discarded. It is that rights are never granted from above: they are won, defended and extended through the struggles of ordinary people, and a movement that loses contact with those struggles loses both its legitimacy and its power.
Rather, the question is how universal principles can be grounded in African experiences, histories, social relationships, and aspirations without compromising their substance. This requires community-based organising, local accountability and a polycentric movement: many centres of initiative, united by shared principles rather than a single institutional voice. It also requires recognising communities as political actors and rights holders, not merely beneficiaries of programmes designed elsewhere. Gayatri Spivak’s celebrated question; can the subaltern speak poses the movement’s hardest test: whether those who claim to represent the marginalised end up effacing their voices in the very act of representation. The answer cannot be to speak on behalf of communities. It must be to build the conditions in which communities speak, organise and lead for themselves.
A new generation is expanding the meaning of rights
Across Africa, younger generations are increasingly challenging conventional boundaries between political rights, economic justice, and democratic participation. Their demands frequently connect accountability to employment, corruption to public services, policing to dignity, and political exclusion to broader questions of generational justice.