Social contracts and state fragility represent two sides of one coin. The former concept highlights that governments need to deliver three “Ps”—protection, provision, and political participation—to be acceptable for societies, whereas the latter argues that states can fail due to lack of authority (inhibiting protection), capacity (inhibiting provision), or legitimacy. Defunct social contracts often lead to popular unrest. Using empirical evidence from the Middle East and North Africa, we demonstrate how different notions of state fragility lead to different kinds of grievances and how they can be remedied by measures of social protection. Social protection is always a key element of government provision and hence a cornerstone of all social contracts. It can most easily counteract grievances that were triggered by decreasing provision (e.g., after subsidy reforms in Iran and Morocco) but also partially substitute for deficient protection (e.g., by the Palestinian National Authority, in pre-2011 Yemen) or participation (information campaign accompanying Moroccan subsidy cut; participatory set-ups for cash-for-work programmes in Jordan). It can even help maintain a minimum of state–society relations in states defunct in all three Ps (e.g., Yemen). Hence, social protection can be a powerful instrument to reduce state fragility and mend social contracts. Yet, to be effective, it needs to address grievances in an inclusive, rule-based, and non-discriminatory way. In addition, to gain legitimacy, governments should assume responsibility over social protection instead of outsourcing it to foreign donors.

Cash-for-Work (CfW)/public works programmes have gained great interest recently because they can deliver employment and income for vulnerable households, in addition to dearly needed infrastructure. Studying donor-funded CfW programmes for Syrian refugees and their local neighbours in Jordan we show that CfW can also improve social cohesion, which is particularly important in the context of state fragility and migration. The studied programmes strengthen the sense of belonging and horizontal trust of participants and non-participants, refugees and locals, and in particular women. Their effect on vertical trust, however, is more ambiguous because many Syrians and Jordanians attribute positive effects to donor support rather than to Jordanian authorities. We use a mixed method approach including semi-structured interviews with 390 CfW participants, other community members and neutral observers and a quantitative analysis of a survey covering all 1847 participants of one CfW programme.

1. The role that social contracts play in the stability of countries and the well-being of people has recently re-emerged as a field of research. Social contracts can be defined as the total set ‘o...

This chapter examines civil resistance in the Syrian Uprising, looking both at its consequences for the power struggle and its long-term likely effect on citizen participation in Syria. Non-violent resistance as a form of mass power can force an end to authoritarian governance provided that—as the transition paradigm from democratization studies argues—moderates on both regime and opposition sides marginalize hardliners. However, in Syria hardliners remained dominant, and new, fundamentalist hardliners such as Islamic State entered the scene. Thus transition failed, with the outcome being authoritarian resilience, violent revolution, and collapse into civil war. This chapter offers explanations of why mass mobilization took place and why it led to escalating conflict, detailing the sectarian violence and the domestic and international factors that led to descent into civil war. Yet peaceful civil resistance also precipitated a rise in associational activity that may have positive consequences in the long run.