A_04 Policies of Social Cohesion in Africa: Entangled Governance in Post-Trauma Societies and the Role of International Organizations

As part of the focus area on cohesion policies and the conditions of political legitimacy, this work package (WP) empirically examines top-down and bottom-up governance strategies and practices for producing social cohesion in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa. In all three countries, current policies aimed at strengthening social cohesion emerge within a field of tension between regional path dependencies, transregional entanglements, and discursive framings promoted by international organizations.

The WP investigates this constellation in three states in which, following the overcoming of profound political crises and violent conflicts, deliberate policies to strengthen social cohesion have been initiated: in Rwanda after the genocide (1994), in South Africa after the end of apartheid (1994), and in Ethiopia after the war between the central government and the leadership of the Tigray region (2020—2022). More specifically, these policies differ in their techniques of governance: national dialogues (Ethiopia), state-directed civic education (Rwanda), social, labor, and immigration policies (South Africa), as well as differently structured transitional justice processes. Indigenous traditions of conflict resolution can be observed alongside forms of cultural transfer and social learning in transregional contexts.

The WP also examines how three international norm entrepreneurs—the African Union (AU), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)—frame understandings of social cohesion. What happens concretely when universal conceptions of cohesion—such as the idea of “democratic” cohesion—encounter indigenous, traditional, and particularistic understandings? We also explore the interaction between political institutions and cohesion, which is often not defined uniformly but instead rests on multiple, parallel, and competing conceptions.

By tracing international dialectical entanglements and uncovering different policies, practices, and shifts in the meaning of cohesion, the WP contributes to answering the core question of Focus Area 2 of the research area: how and why political institutions select specific practices and policies to produce social cohesion. In addition, from perspectives of the Global South, we examine how this imagined or materially strengthened cohesion, following a collectively experienced societal trauma, may either reinforce the legitimacy of state institutions or undermine it.

The significance of transformation under conditions of globalization is particularly contested in the three countries under study, given the backdrop of promises of (post-crisis) economic growth alongside the persistence or even intensification of profound inequalities. By placing local cosmologies and practices of social cohesion at the center of analysis, the WP also makes a key contribution to the decolonization of the concept of “social cohesion” and advances methodological debates on international comparison and measurability.