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.
Digital technologies have expanded opportunities for mobilisation, documentation, solidarity, and public scrutiny. They have also introduced new risks involving surveillance, disinformation, online harassment, and restrictions on digital freedoms. What is particularly significant is that many young people are not necessarily rejecting democracy. They are questioning forms of democracy that appear unable or unwilling to respond to their aspirations. This distinction matters and the response cannot simply be to persuade young Africans to appreciate existing democratic institutions. It must also involve making those institutions more responsive, inclusive, and accountable.
What is emerging, in Baxi’s terms, is a shift from the politics of human rights; the management of standards by professionals and institutions towards a politics for human rights: insurgent movements in which those who suffer become the authors of the norms meant to protect them. Guha would have recognised in these mobilisations what he called the autonomous domain of popular politics: forms of organisation, solidarity and imagination that do not wait for elite permission. The task of the established movement is not to tutor this energy but to join it, resource it and defend its space.
Human rights organisations should engage younger generations not as programme participants alone but as co-creators and leaders, while confronting their own internal hierarchies and exclusions. The same principle applies to women, persons with disabilities, displaced populations, informal workers, and communities historically excluded from decision-making. A democratic future cannot be built through the continued marginalisation of those who constitute its social foundation.
Reclaiming African agency without abandoning universal principles
The changing international environment introduces another dimension to this debate. Geopolitical competition, shifting development priorities, declining confidence in multilateral institutions, and accusations of selective application of international norms have complicated the operating environment for human rights organisations. Criticism of double standards in the international system deserves serious engagement. The credibility of human rights principles is weakened when violations are condemned in some contexts but minimised or overlooked in others. However, the response to inconsistency cannot be the abandonment of universal standards. Shivji’s own position is instructive here. The sharpest African critic of human rights as an ideology of empire has never doubted the universality of the demand for dignity; he questions only who is entitled to define it, deploy it and speak in its name. Universality is not weakened when it is claimed from below. It is authenticated.
African agency should not be confused with the unrestricted authority of governments to determine which rights their citizens may enjoy. Sovereignty belongs ultimately to people, not merely to those who exercise state power. An authentically African approach to human rights must therefore combine historical consciousness, cultural legitimacy, and regional ownership with firm commitments to accountability, equality, and freedom. Ake insisted likewise that an African democracy worthy of the name could not be an abstract template indifferent to time and place; it had to be concrete, anchored in how people actually live, labour, organise and resist.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provides an important foundation. Its recognition of individual rights, peoples’ rights, duties, and collective wellbeing offers opportunities to reconnect human rights with questions of solidarity, development, participation, and social justice. Institutions such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ECOWAS, and relevant Central African regional mechanisms can play important roles. But their effectiveness depends not only on normative mandates. It also depends on political commitment, institutional independence, access to justice, implementation and solidarity across borders, including across linguistic divides. Regional human rights protection must become more accessible and consequential for the people it is intended to serve.
From defending democracy to making democracy worth believing in
For too long, democracy and human rights have sometimes been approached as separate fields of intervention. Democracy practitioners focus on elections, political participation, institutional reform, and constitutional governance. Human rights actors concentrate on freedoms, legal protections, accountability, and remedies for violations. In practice, these agendas are deeply interconnected. An election cannot be meaningfully democratic where citizens cannot freely organise, speak, associate, or challenge those in authority.
Similarly, human rights protections remain vulnerable where political institutions lack accountability, checks and balances are weakened, and citizens have limited opportunities to influence public decisions. But the relationship extends beyond institutional safeguards. A democracy that protects freedom of expression while tolerating systematic economic exclusion remains incomplete. A government that promises economic development while suppressing political freedoms cannot claim to have resolved the question of human dignity. The future therefore lies in bringing together democratic governance, human rights, economic justice, and social inclusion as mutually reinforcing dimensions of public life. This means moving beyond an overwhelmingly defensive posture.
Defending civic space, protecting activists, challenging unlawful detention, and resisting constitutional manipulation remain indispensable. Yet the human rights movement must also articulate a positive vision of the societies it seeks to help build. What does a rights-respecting economy look like? How should public resources be governed to advance dignity and equality? How can communities exercise meaningful influence over decisions affecting their livelihoods? What would democratic accountability mean for young people confronting unemployment, or for women whose unpaid labour sustains households and communities? These are not peripheral development questions. They are central questions about the future of rights. Ake’s answer was what he called social democracy: a democracy anchored in the material life of ordinary people, in which participation means real power over the decisions that shape livelihoods, and development is undertaken by the people and not merely for them. Chua’s analysis points to the same conclusion from another direction: a democracy that coexists with entrenched economic exclusion will eventually be consumed by the backlash it breeds. Democratic security and distributive justice stand or fall together.
Reimagining the movement and its methods
If the human rights movement is to remain relevant and effective, several shifts deserve consideration. First, it must reconnect rights advocacy with the lived realities of communities, recognising that dignity is experienced through both freedom and material wellbeing. It must learn to work where Chatterjee’s political society lives in informal settlements, markets, farms, transport networks and community associations, where most people actually negotiate with power and not only in the formal civil society of registered organisations and legal claims.
Second, it must build alliances across institutional boundaries, linking rights defenders with labour, women’s and youth movements, environmental advocates and community groups, while engaging non-state power, including corporations and armed actors.
Third, it must invest in intergenerational leadership and the sustainability of civic movements. A movement cannot continually speak about the future while reproducing structures that limit the participation and leadership of younger generations.
Fourth, it must rethink the relationship between formal institutions and informal systems of accountability. Community dialogue, mediation, customary institutions, and local solidarity networks can contribute to rights protection when they operate consistently with equality, inclusion, and fundamental freedoms.
Finally, philanthropy and development partners must examine their own approaches. Short funding cycles, fragmented interventions and donor-defined indicators can undermine movement autonomy; flexible support must combine rapid protection with long-term organising.
Supporting the future of human rights requires patient investment in relationships, ideas, collective agency and the movement’s capacity to learn and assess its actual effects on people’s lives. It also requires the humility to recognise that durable transformation cannot be engineered through projects alone. It requires, above all, what Baxi calls taking human suffering seriously: measuring the movement’s work not by reports produced or funds disbursed, but by the difference it makes to those who bear the weight of violation.
The future is not predetermined
It would be a mistake to interpret the challenges facing human rights and democracy in West and Central Africa as evidence of an inevitable democratic decline. The region’s political trajectories are neither uniform nor predetermined.
There are important examples of constitutional resilience, peaceful political transitions, civic mobilisation, institutional innovation, and communities organising to defend their rights. These experiences remind us that democratic progress is rarely linear. It advances through contestation, negotiation, setbacks, and renewed collective action. The task is therefore neither to romanticise the past nor to surrender to pessimism about the future. It is to learn from the limitations of previous approaches while building on the achievements that remain worth protecting. The convening on the future of human rights offers an opportunity to move this conversation beyond familiar diagnoses of shrinking civic space and democratic regression. The more consequential question is what kind of human rights movement, democratic institutions, and relationships between citizens and power will be necessary for the decades ahead.
Our answer begins with a simple proposition: human rights must be reclaimed as the everyday language of dignity, justice, belonging, and collective possibility. For West and Central Africa, this means protecting fundamental freedoms while confronting economic exclusion; defending constitutionalism while demanding accountable governance; strengthening regional institutions while investing in community agency; and upholding universal principles while recognising African histories and aspirations. Baxi has described human rights as a politics of hope; a language through which people who suffer imagine, and insist upon, a different world. That is the register in which the African human rights movement must now speak.
The future of human rights will not be determined solely in courtrooms, conference halls, regional institutions, or international forums. It will also be shaped in communities confronting insecurity, among young people demanding opportunity, through women’s struggles for equality, and wherever citizens insist that power must serve human dignity. The challenge before us is not simply to preserve the human rights architecture we have inherited. It is to make human rights and democracy sufficiently meaningful, inclusive, and transformative that future generations will see them not as distant promises, but as foundations of the societies they aspire to build. Guha called this the small voice of history: the persistent, often unrecorded insistence of ordinary people on their own dignity. The human rights architecture of the future will stand only if it is built around that voice; not speaking for it, not administering it, but amplifying it until power has no choice but to listen.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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