THE CHALLENGE OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN REGIONAL
SECURITY: A REVIEW OF PEACE AND SECURITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA. IBBO MANDAZA,
EDITOR. HARARE: SAPES, 1996. 183pp.©
Sub-Saharan African politics is framed by the triple challenges of
democracy, development, and defense. In a context of postcolonial conflict,
underdevelopment, failed states, and regional insecurity, Africans are
attempting to erect viable, stable, enduring, and legitimate governmental
structures that can ensure their citizens a reasonable quality of life.
As a first course, this requires a focus on the political, economic,
and cultural dimensions of Africa's security concerns in a systematic
fashion paying attention to the peculiarities and continuities wrought
from the dynamic security environment in the region. Ibbo Mandaza's
(editor) Peace and Security in Southern Africa is a collection
of five essays by Africa specialists that addresses the challenges of
internal and external security for Southern African states. This effort
derives from a larger research program of the South African Regional
Institute for Policy Studies (SARIPS). The authors attempt to provide
an expansive definition of peace and security, a discussion of the challenges
to state building and democratization, an explication of the enduring
impact of colonialism and dependence on regional security relationships,
and an analysis of the prospects for regional cooperation and economic
integration.
Mandaza's introduction lays out the scope of the project and is followed
by Thomas Ohlson's lead essay on conflict resolution in Africa, which
treads--often deftly--over familiar territory for those acquainted with
arguments favoring the expansion of the security concept for analyses
of post cold war states--especially those of the former "Third
World" (e.g. Ayoob 1995, Buzan 1991, Job 1992, Klare & Thomas
1994). Ohlson recognizes -- as do the other authors in the volume --
that development, democracy, and security are linked, and he insists
that there are no quick fixes for the region's security problems. He
is emphatic that conflict resolution strategies should emerge "from
the people" and that these should reflect the local circumstances
that obtain in the region (p. 32). For Ohlson, democratization, the
emergence of a regional security complex, and a conducive international
environment are necessary precursors to regional stability.
The central argument for Ohlson is that Africa cannot copy the European
experience as a pathway to development, democracy, and regional security.
Hardly a novel suggestion (Henderson 1995), it has recently been echoed
by African leaders such as Museveni who maintains that "We are
building Afrocentric, not Eurocentric countries" (McGeary 1997,
40). Ohlson maintains that regional insecurity is likely to emerge from
the diffusion of internal conflicts, tensions borne of interdependency,
and asymmetries in economic and military power (p. 24). Assigning a
dominant role to South Africa in regional development, he argues that
the prospects for such developments are proscribed by the need for socioeconomic
reconstruction (p.27), a restructuring of South Africa's security apparatus
(p. 27), and the adoption of compromise strategies among the major actors
in South African politics.
While cogent and straightforward, this essay--like most of the essays
in this volume--covers little new ground. A glaring omission in Ohlson's
work that is symptomatic of most of the essays in this volume is the
absence of both a theoretical framework for the emergence of cooperation
among Southern African states in the region and a programmatic rationale
for the development of interstate cooperation. What Ohlson and others
put forward amounts to a functionalist inspired "wish-list"
of African needs that are to be met as a result of some unspecified
process that emerges "from the people."
These shortcomings are also evident in Tiyanjana Maluwa's article entitled
"The Refugee Problem in the Quest for Peace and Security
in Southern Africa." After acknowledging the impact of the proliferation
of refugees on the security of Southern African states, Maluwa calls
for a regional "Marshall Plan" to alleviate the refugee problem
in the region (p. 139). It is not clear whether Maluwa favors a donor-driven
strategy (p. 141)--which is highly unlikely anyway--or a regional effort
focusing on the OAU and the SADC (pp. 143-4) or both. Nonetheless, beyond
its desirability, it is not clear how this Marshall Plan is to be developed
and instituted. Moreover, in "Emancipating Security and Development
for Equity and Social Justice," Winnie Wanzala's argument that
"[c]onfidence-building measures should ultimately aim to delegitimize
the use of force" is laudable, but the mechanisms for such developments
are unspecified. Beyond promulgating neologisms such as "multilogues"
between various "NGOs, children's groups, student and youth groups,
unions and women's groups" (p. 98), Wanzala offers a litany of
ostensible policy prescriptions that are as ambiguous as they are untenable.
For example, among the guidelines for developing a comprehensive security
strategy there is the following item:
"The imperative to address forms of violence engendered
by prevailing development and security approaches and alternatives,
by identifying and encouraging awareness about the sources of direct,
structural and cultural violence, and by encouraging questioning of
socially designated boundaries and the dualisms they inhabit [original
emphasis]" (p. 98).
These vague meanderings can hardly serve as effective templates for
security policy.
Among the authors in the volume, Wanzala comes closest to offering policy
prescriptions for Southern African regional stability that extend beyond
primarily normatively driven "wish-lists" (e.g. p. 43). It
is not that normative arguments are unimportant; clearly, any student
of this region is immediately confronted with the atrocious human rights
abuses that have plagued the citizens of the former Frontline States.
Nonetheless, in the postcolonial era, citizens of Southern Africa require
a program of action that attends to the priorities and tradeoffs that
are necessary in any plan for development, democracy, and defense. There
are unavoidable asymmetries that will accompany the reconstruction and
reorientation of states such as are occurring in the region. The promulgation
of utopic wish lists simply will make a difficult situation even more
difficult as expectations rise and frustration mounts in the face of
real scarcities in the internal and external environment of these states.
In such contexts, even physical security is threatened.
It follows that security analysts should pose paradigms that reflect
the strengths and limitations of Africa's newly democratizing institutions
of governance without marginalizing the aspirations of the peoples in
the region but at the same time taking into account the very real scarcities
that are unavoidable in nation-state building. While the authors are
obviously concerned with the issues of Southern African security, they
collectively fail to engage the core issues that would allow for theoretical
consistency in their arguments and provide them with a point of departure
for meaningful policy prescriptions. For example, Ohlson, asserts that,
inter alia, asymmetries in economic and military power militate against
Southern African regional development (p. 25-6). In Masa Sejanomane's
analysis of the Lesotho Crisis of 1994, he, like Ohlson, decries the
asymmetries of power and wealth in the region. Similarly, Sejanomane
is critical of the intervention of the leaders of Botswana, South Africa,
and Zimbabwe in Lesotho's succession crisis and suggests that even though
their efforts appeared to decrease tensions in the tiny state, there
is little to be garnered from the Lesotho case to inform analyses of
African security (pp. 82-3). He is correct that Africans have yet to
institutionalize a formal, effective (and widely legitimized) process
of conflict resolution in the region but his dismissal of the "personalistic"
attempts of the regional leaders to (even temporarily) resolve the conflict
does not even allow for the impact of "demonstration effects"
of such intervention on other potential "hot spots." This
myopia is even more pronounced when we realize that it was the initiative
of this troika of leaders that led to the establishment of the Southern
Africa Development Community (SADC) Organ on Politics, Defense and Security
launched in Gaborone in July of 1996 which is the linchpin of an incipient
and indigenous Southern African regional security apparatus.
Fundamentally, the authors in this volume fail to appreciate that the
asymmetries in the region are not simply to be decried in light of normative
arguments but have to be utilized to provide a degree of stability in
the region. Campbell's contribution suffers from these limitations as
well (p. 153). Although, he correctly challenges the problems of the
privatization of violence in the hands of former security elements associated
with the notorious South African Defense Forces (SADF), especially the
mercenaries of Executive Outcomes (p. 154), his wholesale condemnation
of the defense industry of South Africa dislodges his analysis from
the realities of regional development. To be sure, Southern Africa has
the potential to develop as a zone of peace, stability, and development;
however, such is not likely to occur unless there is a degree of executive
and personal security borne of institutional legitimacy, economic stability,
and intercultural cooperation. The fear of coups in newly democratizing
countries and retrenchment from deposed autocrats should be checked
by regional collective security arrangements. The development of such
collective security institutions will ensue, largely, as a function
of the efforts of the regional military and economic power. This role
obviously devolves to South Africa. Once apartheid-era white supremacists
are expunged from the military leadership, a democratic South Africa
will have to assume the mantle of "regional stabilizer." Clearly,
regional security efforts are more likely to be successful when they
are dominated by a preponderant power that can establish multilateral
security regimes that provide collective goods, reduce transaction costs
among members, engender trust among states, and check rogue state leaders.
This argument is consistent with hegemonic stability models (Keohane
1984, Gilpin 1987) that posit that the presence of asymmetries in the
distribution of material and economic capabilities among states in a
region is often more conducive to regional stability (e.g. Weede 1976)
wrought from the preponderant power's (or hegemon's) establishment and
maintenance of international regimes to coordinate interstate activity
in some issue area(s). With the preponderance of South Africa clearly
established, it would appear that Southern Africa is a candidate case
for the emergence of hegemonic stability. Although it is not clear whether
the SADC is presently equipped to serve as the vehicle for Southern
African collective security coordination (see Hussein & Cilliers
1997), it appears to be progressing toward that end (Cawthra 1997).
Not only does hegemonic stability reduce elite insecurity but it can
also lead to the amelioration of health and welfare concerns in the
region. For example, in a hegemonic stability system, the provision
of a security umbrella obviates the pursuit of arms spending among states
and thereby reduces the likelihood of arms races and the conflicts they
might spawn. Further, the presence of an international security regime
might prevent states from wasting newly acquired capital on military
expenditures. Botswana's recent purchases of Leopard tanks are instructive
in this regard. Beyond the security concerns that such purchases cause
in the region--especially in Namibia which is involved in a border dispute
with Botswana over an island on the Chobe river--these expenditures
would be more efficiently targeted to human capital formation, housing,
and health care. In this way, a regional hegemonic stability arrangement
might also lead to the creation of some of the more normatively inspired
aspirations espoused by the authors in Peace and Security. However,
Campbell's condemnation of the historic role of South Africa's security
apparatus (which I largely concur with) seems to blind him to the potential
developmental role of a transformed South African military establishment
in a post-apartheid South African democracy. Moreover, South Africa's
defense assets presently serve as an important source of income for
the state and the region though under a security regime the resources
of the South African arms sector can support African multilateral forces
in peacekeeping roles. Such arrangements might afford poorer democratizing
states the opportunity to begin to stand down their engorged military
establishments and devote greater effort (and resources) to socioeconomic
development.
One comes to appreciate these possibilities once one moves beyond the
critique of the historic atrocities of the apartheid SADF and begins
to address the opportunities provided by the transformations underway
in South Africa. This is not meant to minimize the apartheid government's
brutality but only to recognize the mechanisms in place that should
be utilized to promote growth, democracy, and security in the region.
These are sometimes brutal realities that scholars, policymakers, and
practitioners must confront without glossing over the difficulties associated
with development, democracy, and defense. Such points seem to be lost
on the contributors to Peace and Security.
The failure of the scholars in this volume to engage the theoretical
work--and much of the empirical evidence--on the development of regional
security regimes leads them to parrot one another in decrying the asymmetries
in Southern Africa instead of recognizing the possibilities that arise
from these arrangements, specifically, the conflict dampening impact
of such arrangements in light of hegemonic stability arguments. In fact,
in a departure from the other essays, Maluwa argues for the imposition
"upon the body politic of the region such structures as are necessary
to ensure the existence of viable autonomous, self-sustaining political
and economic entities which can satisfy the varied needs of the citizenry
and eradicate the factors which compel nationals to flee their countries
of origin"(p. 143). This "top down" approach is akin
to hegemonic stability perspectives, but the author does not appear
to recognize the theoretical implications of his own arguments. The
reader is left with a conceptual hodgepodge of amorphous strategies
and ambiguous and untenable policy prescriptions when Southern African
security challenges require much more.
All told, Peace and Security attends to some pressing issues
in the region but does little to point the way forward toward regional
stability. To be sure, the authors' suggestions that solutions should
emerge "from the people" and that these solutions should be
aimed at resolving issues of security, broadly defined, has some currency.
Nonetheless, bereft of a theoretical rationale to explicate the situation
as it stands, their proscriptions are largely gratuitous. We are left
with the need to construct a security framework for Southern Africa
that attends to the changed post cold war international environment
and the opportunities provided by the asymmetries in the region (which
clearly are not going to "go away" in the near future). I
contend that the asymmetries that the authors decry should become the
building blocks for regional stability. In its zeal to suggest how Southern
Africa "ought to be", Peace and Security fails to adequately
attend to Southern Africa "as it is".
REFERENCES
Ayoob, M. 1995. The Third World Security Predicament: State Making,
Regional Conflict, and the International System. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Buzan, B. 1991. People, States, and Fear, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Cawthra, G. 1997. "Subregional Security: The Southern Africa Development
Community." Security Dialogue 28, 2:207-218.
Gilpin, R. 1987. The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press.
Henderson, E. 1995. Afrocentrism and World Politics. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Hussein, S. and J. Cilliers. (1997) "Southern Africa and the Quest
for Collective Security." Security Dialogue 28, 2:191-205.
Job, B. 1992. The Insecurity Dilemma. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Keohane, R. 1984. After Hegemony. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Klare, M. and D. Thomas, eds. 1994. World Security: Challenges for a
New Century, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martins' Press.
McGeary, J. 1997. "An African for Africa" TIME 150, 9: 36-40.
Weede, E. 1976. "Overwhelming Preponderance as a Pacifying Condition
Among Contiguous Asian Dyads, 1950-69." Journal of Conflict Resolution
20:395-411.
Errol A. Henderson
Department of Political Science
The University of Florida
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