Introduction

The broad conceptual objectives of this book do bear restatement here. The first one is to show that the African system for the promotion and protection of human and peoples' rights has manifested its most significant domestic promise when creatively deployed by activist forces in the domestic social struggles that these agents have waged within certain African states (particularly in Nigeria and South Africa). When the African system is so deployed, it can sometimes help shape or reshape the logics of appropriateness, self-understandings, and conceptions of interest held within key domestic institutions of target states, thereby contributing to the generation of valuable forms of correspondence between the norms of the African system and the behavior of the relevant domestic institutions. The other key objective of the book is to demonstrate the need for a modest enlargement of the conventional optics through which the effectiveness of the African system (and of similar IHIs) has hitherto been evaluated. There is a need, it is urged, to reach beyond, without abandoning, the search for state compliance as the measure of the utility of the African system and other such bodies.

The key question here therefore is: what, if anything, does the analysis of the African system's modest domestic impact conducted in earlier chapters tell us about how best to evaluate and imagine IHIs? In the light of that analysis, what the present chapter does is to make a case for movement toward the extension of the measure of IHI effectiveness.