Demilitarisation and Peace-Building in Southern Africa

Volume I - Concepts and Processes

Peter Batchelor, Kees Kingma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138316386
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429838309
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 2004 , this work is based on a collaborative research project, this trilogy considers the dynamics of demilitarisation and peace-building in southern Africa in the aftermath of major violent conflicts. The overall aim of the research is to support and facilitate the achievement of sustainable peace and human development in southern Africa, by analysing demilitarisation and peace-building processes in the region and identifying policy options and interventions for peace-building. The central focus of the research is the extent to which demilitarisation following the termination of wars has contributed to broad processes of peace-building in the affected region. Has the military in southern Africa downsized and refocused towards new roles? Has there been a 'peace-dividend', allowing more investment in economic and human development, thereby dealing with some of the root causes of conflict? Volume I provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of demilitarisation and peace-building processes, applicable particularly in the southern Africa context. This volume argues that a broad concept of peace-building has to take into account economic, political, social and cultural factors, at the local, national and regional level.

Chapter 1

Security and Defence: Concepts and Discourse in Southern Africa¹

André du Pisani

For what can war, but endless war still breed?
John Milton

Introduction

This conceptual chapter explores the shifts in the understanding, usage and implementation of the concepts of ‘security’ and ‘defence’ since the advent of the 1980s. It also examines how these changing concepts are reflected in the discourse on security and defence in southern Africa. The chapter investigates some of the principal debates about security and defence in southern Africa and analyses the literature on the concepts of security and defence in southern Africa. A further issue that will be explored is the link between these discourses and the issue of demilitarisation and peace-building, especially in southern Africa.

For purposes of this chapter, the concept ‘discourse’ refers to the practice of a public, scholarly debate on the genesis of meaning and shifting usage of concepts in art, the humanities and public policy. Discourses are social constructions that relate to power, and are mediated by such relations. Knowledge is never neutral or value-free.

The chapter deals with four principal themes. Firstly, the principal meanings and definitions of the concepts central to this chapter, viewed from different theoretical perspectives, are introduced. This section is followed by a discussion of the relationship between security and defence, and how the evolving concept of security has affected the concept of defence. The third major section explores the changing discourse on security and defence in southern Africa. In particular, it looks at how the changing concepts of security and defence have become embedded in the southern African discourse. The fourth section of the chapter examines more closely particular themes and debates that the changing concepts of security and defence have given rise to, and their relevance for the emerging discourse on security and defence in southern Africa.

Cold War Theoretical Perspectives on Security

For several decades, the predominance of the realist paradigm meant that security was subsumed under the rubric of state power and national interest. The tenets of classical realism include a focus on the nation-state as the principal actor in world politics, and its central proposition is that since the purpose of state-craft is national survival, the acquisition of power is proper and rational. For, as Ann Tickner shows, ‘conceptually, it was synonymous with the security of the state against external dangers, which was to be achieved by increasing military capabilities’ (1995, 176). This state-centred understanding of security was based on the assumption of a firm distinction between domestic ‘order’ and international ‘anarchy’, the latter being a ‘state of nature’ where war is an ever present possibility (Waltz, 1979, 102). Given the absence of an effective international authority to keep aggressive ambitions in check, states must rely on their own capacities for achieving security. As realists acknowledge, this often results in what they describe as a ‘security dilemma’; what one state might justify as legitimate security-enhancing actions are likely to be perceived by others as threatening. For realists, what stability does exist in such a context can be attributed to the balance of power. The balance of power is in turn anchored on military security alliances.

These realist assumptions about the nature of world society and the security-driven behaviour of states were partly vindicated by the behaviour of the former Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, and by state-sanctioned intervention in the affairs of other states. The escalation of the arms race between the United States and Soviet Union could indeed be viewed as a classic case of the security dilemma, yet the bipolarity produced a balance of power that (according to Kenneth Waltz [1964] and other realists) assured a measure of global security and stability. The destructive capacity of military technologies led to a specialisation in international relations, the field of security studies, which further ossified the meaning of security into a state-oriented, militarist framework. Based on realist notions of politics, and permeated by US strategic doctrine concerning nuclear weapons, as well as the security fractures of the US and its NATO allies, the field of security studies was informed by the view that since nuclear wars were too costly in both human and economic terms to engage in, security was ‘synonymous with nuclear deterrence and nuclear power-balancing’ (Tickner, 1995, 177).

The notion of collective security, in its original formulation, sees only states as security objects. States are the building blocs of collective security. One could hardly make negotiated guarantee systems such as those that are involved in collective security, without having a system of a definite number of clearly defined co-operative units. The notion of collective security informs the understanding of security held by the United Nations (UN).

The Security Council of the UN was designed as an agency of collective security and enforcement, in principle enacted by the forces of the UN itself, directed by the Military Staff Committee, as provided for in Chapter VII. In fact, the Military Staff Committee was immobilised at the outset of the Cold War, and ideas of a standing UN military force, or even of national military and air forces on call from member states by the UN (Articles 43 and 45), never came to fruition. The Security Council has been able to agree on collective security/enforcement operations twice during its history (at the onset of the Korean War and in the Gulf War of 1990). It has embarked on peace enforcement actions in the Belgian Congo, Somalia and most recently in Bosnia, with mixed results.

The concept of peacekeeping, however (by impartial forces, lightly armed and authorised to use lethal force only in self-defence to monitor a ceasefire already agreed to by the local parties), developed outside the explicit authorisation of the Charter, has overall been more successful.

Security Reconsidered (1970s–1980s)

Although bipolarity began to unravel well before the end of the Cold War and economic issues appeared on the security agenda with the energy crisis of the 1970s, a wider debate about the meaning of security did not take firm root until the early 1980s (Mathews, 1989).

As relations between the great powers improved in the 1980s and the world seemed destined for greater peace, opportunities for reflection led to broader understandings of security. The ‘re-visioning’ of security, to invoke a term used by Ann Tickner (1995), arose from a variety of sources – academics, ‘new thinking’ in the former Soviet Union, and scholars concerned with security issues in the South. The military dimensions of security were re-examined as the definition of security was broadened to include economic, social and ecological dimensions (Ayoob, 1991; Ball, 1988).

Laurie Nathan advances two principal reasons for the broadening of the concept of security:

First, the security of states is not necessarily synonymous with the security of the people; in much of the world the dominant threat to citizens is their own government. Second, non-military problems like poverty, oppression and environmental degradation present grave threats to the security of people. These problems may also give rise to violent conflict and threaten the security of the state (1994, 10).

Since the classical realist approach is concerned with protecting the state, it is inevitably linked with the preservation of the status quo. By contrast, the new approach conceives of security as a peaceful process of social and political transformation. By including considerations of injustice, economic decline and environmental tensions, it offers an emancipatory agenda for deep change, and interfaces the discourse of security with that of development.

It is important to point out that this ‘re-visioning’ of security coincided with a profound questioning of the theoretical moorings of the field in general (Lapid, 1989; Booth, 1991). These new perspectives take as their departure point the understanding that the post-Cold War world requires a fundamental rethinking of the dominant assumptions of realism: in an interdependent and global world facing multiple security threats, the state-centric analysis, which emphasises the political/military dimensions of security, is hardly adequate.

Nevertheless, this broadening of the definition of security brought some difficulties of its own. All discourses use language to entrench power (discourse is invariably shaped by social power), and states in particular appropriate discourses of power. Security narratives provide more than representations of reality; they help to construct reality. The confluence between security, rights and development thus made the concept of security an actualising one; paradoxically, it also made it more elusive. For Prins (1994b) ‘security’ is ‘actualising’ because it ‘accesses power, ideas, institutions and key values, such as justice’.

While military conflict will continue to be a source of insecurity in southern Africa, threats to security cannot be confined to military threats. Writing in 1988, Azar and Moon, for example, defined threats to security more broadly as threats to values and identities, the nature of which will vary across time, space and ‘issue area’. Security thus has an existential dimension, if it threatens the very existence of the state, people and values. Moreover, southern Africa, in common with many other regions, experiences economic and social threats to security, and where military threats exist, these are usually interdependent (Ball, 1988). Nicole Ball proposes an expanded definition of security, in view of such interdependence: internal military conflicts often arise because elites are unwilling to alter exploitative social and economic relations. She also suggests a trade-off between military and economic security, where resources are diverted from social development (see Peter Batchelor’s chapter in this volume) to the military. Military expenditures have a negative effect on economic and social development, since the technologies necessary for military development are of little use in providing the material needs of growing populations (Ball, 1988, 163–7). Ball’s insights are particularly true for Africa and other regions undergoing transformation.

Caroline Thomas also underlines the economic dimensions of security when she defines security, not only in terms of the internal security of the state, but more importantly, in terms of secure systems of food, health, money and trade (1987). For Thomas, the provision of basic human needs is crucial to security. Like Ball, she notes the interdependence between military and economic security, observing that the failure to meet basic needs aggravates the internal security of the state. Thomas, writing on the state in Africa, emphasises ‘the lack of control over the external environment where weak states operate in an international economic order that favours the powerful, who are both the rule-makers and the rule-enforcers’ (Tickner, 1995, 180).

These redefinitions of security indicate not only the inadequacy of traditional realist understandings, but also raise questions about the concept of the ‘state’ itself. Jackson and Rosberg, for example, question the usefulness in Africa of the concept of the state, as generally used in the Western context. They coin the term, ‘quasi-states’, which, according to them, derive their legitimacy from the international community rather than from their own citizens and the robustness of their public institutions (1982).

Richard Ullman also defines security as an attempt to respond to events and developments that threaten to degrade the quality of life for the citizens of a state. Among these threats, he lists the inability to meet basic human needs, environmental degradation and natural disasters (1983). Ullman and numerous other scholars since have identified transnational tensions as important security concerns for both developed and developing countries (although the latter are often more vulnerable). These include, among others, environmental degradation, the debt burden, migrants and refugees, HIV/Aids, the globalisation of finance, and the rise of transnational criminal activities. These phenomena, having contributed to an inclusive and broad understanding of security as a global, common concern, and not simply the concern of individual states, nonetheless brought conceptual imprecision to the notion of security (Dirks, 1993; Prins, 1994b).

The broadening of the concept of security brought with it the danger that matters that fell within the domain of development and non-military security issues could become ‘securitised’, in the sense that these could become militarised. The social and environmental dimensions of security, for example, do not necessarily pose direct threats to security, but the political consequences of resource-based conflicts, for example, can clearly have security implications.

Redefining security brought with it a host of normative and agency issues. Normative issues are concerned with values and their protection, while agency issues refer to the appropriate means for achieving human security. The following questions illustrate some of these considerations. Whose security are we talking about? Who are the principal human agencies at the level below that of the state: ethnic groups, indigenous people, marginalised communities, individuals, given that all of these can be perceived as having security concerns? While their concerns might overlap with those of the state, they are clearly not identical with state security (Booth, 1991, 341). Moreover, the state itself can pose a threat to human security (as was the case in South Africa under apartheid and in other states led by dictators). Women, children, internally displaced and the poor as well as other marginalised groups can be seen as victims of state security. This view has been demonstrated by feminist scholars. In the work of Enloe (1989), Peterson, (1992), Tickner (1992), Jaggar (1983) and Stiehm (1983), for example, state structures are seen as a way of reproducing patriarchy and inequality.

From ‘Collective’ to ‘Common’ Security (1980s)

The multi-dimensionality of security also features in the work of Barry Buzan (1983, 1991) and Jessica Mathews (1989), among others. Multi-dimensionality, defined by its military, economic, environmental, political and social dimensions, as well as the interdependence between them, is at the very heart of current thinking about security. The World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) emphasised the interdependence between economic and environmental dimensions of security when it called for sustainable development that did not compromise the future of coming generations. It also stressed the meeting of universal basic needs as an important aspect of sustainable development, and, by extension, of security.

The emphasis on individuals in the natural environment, emphasised by all proponents of common security, calls into question the role of the state as a provider of security. Already in 1982, the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues argued that, in the nuclear age, no state could achieve security by itself. Building on the ground-breaking work of Scandinavian peace researchers (notably, Johan Galtung), proponents of common security have proposed understandings of security that contest the boundaries and agencies within which our traditional understanding thereof is framed, and merged it with the discourse on peace studies.

One of the most profound and creative re-examinations of security is that of Barry Buzan. Writing from a neo-realist perspective, Buzan examines issues raised by proponents of common security. Having broadened his definition of security to encompass freedom from military, political, societal, economic and environmental threats, Buzan presents a compelling case for the need for a new field of security studies, which, in contrast to traditional approaches, would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Security and Defence: Concepts and Discourse in Southern Africa
• 2 ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’: The Structural Causes of Crisis and Violence in Africa
• 3 State Capacity and Democratisation in Southern Africa
• 4 The Economics of Demilitarisation in Southern Africa
• 5 The Sociology of Demilitarisation and Peace-Building in Southern Africa
• 6 Demobilisation, Reintegration and Peace-Building in Southern Africa
• Index