Abstract

Over the COVID-19 period, much attention has been paid to the governance relationship between citizens and the state. In this article, however, we focus on a feature that is less evident in the day-to-day living of the social contract: the relationship between citizens. Because this horizontal cohesion is critical to the social contract, we suggest that it should not be neglected, even amid a deepening crisis of state–citizen relations. Using the case of South Africa's vaccine roll-out as an illustration, we argue that certain kinds of state failures – failures in making complex fairness decisions, in treating citizens as equals when enacting these decisions, and in providing public justification for these decisions – risk dual damage to both citizen–state and citizen–citizen relations and so undermine an already fragile social contract.