Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sub-Saharan Africa: Searching For A Social Contract, David D. Mayen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the phenomenon of civil war and state failure in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from a social contract perspective. Its main hypothesis is that authoritarianism will lead to state failure in the context of SSA. In this regard, SSA states are political communities that have not done enough to promote and develop a social contract that is compatible with the region's sociopolitical and structural peculiarities. Since civil war and state failure have hampered different dimensions of human progress in SSA, analyzing the main patterns of conflict will inevitably lead to an underlying incompatibility between existing governing political structures and …