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18 March 2000

By the nineties the military balance between the state and society in Africa has changed profoundly. At independence, one could still argue that the post-colonial regime retained the balance of force through control over the security apparatus and the level of armaments at the unique disposal of the same. At the turn of the century an increased number of African states have atrophied and weapons spilling over from armed conflicts throughout the region circulate virtually uncontrolled, allowing societies to arm and challenge the incumbent élite while the security agencies themselves, in many instances, have decayed and lost their coherence. As a result, a military victory by any of the various armed forces in a country such as the DR Congo is unlikely to have any impact on levels of social violence, social fragmentation and the nature of the economy. At the same time state control, to the extent that it exists in the form of organised administration and the provision of services, has contracted inward, in many instances reflecting an exclusively urban bias and neglect of the rural populations.

Today the surfeit of arms and lack of control over national territories has resulted in much of Sub-Saharan Africa being characterised not by the state¹s monopoly over the instruments of coercion, but by a balance of force between the state and the community. The result, in a highly armed and violent continent, ironically, is the creation of a security vacuum. Within Nairobi, Johannesburg or Luanda security is available to those who can afford it. To Angola, Sierra Leone and the DR Congo, war comes to those countries that have exploitable resources worth fighting over. In both instances the vast majority of the poor population are left to fend for themselves and forced to arm and organise to prevent their exploitation by local warlords, ethnically based politicians or criminals.

The response of the international community to the challenge of instability in Africa is generally hostage to the state-centred peacekeeping debate. It is to peacekeeping that commentators turn when looking for solutions to violent crises that are very different to those envisaged at the end of Second World War when the UN Charter was drafted.

During the Cold War regional conflicts were at once internationalised and subsumed within the superpower competition and controlled to avoid escalation into nuclear conflict. In the process the strategic relevance of regions such as Africa was elevated as part of the global chess board - pawns in a much larger game. At the beginning of the twenty first century the situation is much changed. Africa has lost its strategic relevance. Apart from humanitarian concerns, only selected areas with exploitable natural resources demand the attention of the larger and more powerful countries.

A blurring in the clear demarcation of roles between sub-regional, regional and international organisations - the UN in particular ­ has occurred after the end of the Cold War. During the bi-polar era, the division of labour was clear. The UN mounted peacekeeping operations and deployed political missions, while regional organisations concentrated on preventive diplomacy. The proliferation of internal conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall has confounded this clear division. Almost as if to mirror this trend, the increase in the number and the nature of the various actors involved in internal conflicts have further complicated the ability of state-centred negotiations and mediation to succeed.

Direct conflict between African states has, in fact, been a relatively isolated phenomenon and those that have taken place have not involved any substantial commitment of resources for peacekeeping operations. Virtually all African conflicts that have involved some type of peacekeeping effort have been conflicts within states. An important reason for this feature is the permeability of African borders and the weakness of African states themselves. This does not deny the fact that virtually all of these internal conflicts have had a regional dimension. In many cases neighbouring countries have involved themselves in the internal affairs of others or allowed their territory to be used as a springboard for such involvement. In others countries do not control their own territory and cannot end cross-border actions, particularly when international boundaries cut through rather than follow broad ethnic and tribal divides.

Globally a new security paradigm seems to be emerging. This consists of regions accepting co-responsibility and sharing the burden to police themselves and a dilution of the central role that many had hoped that the United Nations would play in this regard. This agenda is primarily, but not exclusively, driven by the United States that is seeking co-option and burden sharing by others in the hegemonic role that the demise of the Soviet Union had thrust upon it.

The most recent and arguably the most important indication of this trend is the US drive for NATO to undertake so-called non-Article 5 missions and US support for a greater OEuropean defence identity¹ as opposed to a transatlantic identity.

It is also becoming apparent that Africa is increasingly intent on engaging and dealing with its own challenges and that the phrase OAfrican solutions to African problems¹ may yet come to haunt the continent. In this process the debate within the continent is enthusiastic about the complementary role that sub-regional organisations can play in the maintenance of peace and security in the various sub-regions and the role that the latter can play in peacekeeping.

Yet regional approaches bring little additional capabilities to bear, apart from the burden to co-ordinate and to collaborate. Regional alliances of the willing and able in Africa do not have the practical means to bring security to the continent. As part of regional peacekeeping forces, tentative democracies and de facto one-party states also find it difficult to transfer the values of respect for human rights and impartiality to the armed forces of neighbouring countries when they have been unable to inculcate the same within their own borders.

To be fair, the thrust towards the provision of regional stability through indigenous peacekeeping forces in Africa by donor countries does not mean complete abandonment of the continent to its own devices, although Africa is increasingly barely at the margins of global security concerns.

Regional peacekeeping capacity building programs will continue. They are domestically less controversial than the provision of direct assistance to the security agencies of African countries, provide high donor visibility at limited cost and serve to strengthen the myth of African solutions to African problems. Many African governments will continue to accept such assistance ­ using it for their own, as opposed to the intended, purposes as demonstrated by Uganda where its ACRI trained peacekeeping battalion is deployed on offensive missions deep into the territory of neighbouring DR Congo in support of rebel forces.

In their efforts at wrestling with the challenge of helping Africa to become more secure at domestically affordable political and economic costs, the recipes of donor countries are becoming more varied. Limited logistic support and financial assistance will still be forthcoming to assist larger African countries such as Nigeria (and South Africa?) to enforce their own version of stability ­ often in their own interests ­ in their backyard. Such support will be enough to assuage domestic political and other opinion that outside countries are Odoing something¹ short of committing own ground forces and the risks that such an operation would incur. Britain already provides limited logistic support to ECOMOG in Sierra Leone while the US funds the same.

A recent trend is also the increased use of private security companies such as Sandline International or Military Professional Resources Inc. in lieu of British or American combat formations. In the absence of meaningful institutions for the provision of security at the national level, a change in the debate regarding foreign private security companies seems to be emerging. Whereas the debate was obsessed with the historically emotive concept of Omercenaries¹, much of the contemporary writing and thinking are moving away from the often sterile attempts to judge actions as being mercenary or not. Although perhaps not in the guise of Executive Outcomes, the privatisation of security and even peacekeeping and war in Africa will continue. Part of the reason for this is, of course, that a number of governing elite¹s are using their armed forces for activities that can best be described as being of a military commercial nature. In this process the armed forces of a number of countries engage in entrepreneur, often illegal and exploitive endeavours in the territory of neighbouring countries where they are deployed in the interests of elite¹s, to compensate for their poor resources and often merely to survive in a hostile environment. Building African peacekeeping capacity and the use of private companies cannot and will not be much more than of symbolic value at a time when the fundamental challenge is that of state building. While such endeavours may help African armed forces to build regional confidence and stability, the need for state-building inevitably means a return to basics ­ and it is here that Africans need to recapture their own destiny in a concrete manner.

Domestic security cannot be divorced from regional security. Basic stability and law and order must be provided within a country that wishes to provide the same in its neighbourhood. This is arguably the larger and more important challenge given the extent of state collapse in much of Africa. Encouraging undemocratic weak states to assist other undemocratic weak states in the provision of security without an unequivical and significant involvement of the international community may, over time, have unintended consequences ­ serving to further strengthen external involvement in the affairs of others, while continuing to allow poor countries to expend significant scarce resources on the maintenance of military forces with an essentially non-domestic security orientation.

The transformation from essentially predatory and antiquated security agencies to one¹s that can serve Africa¹s needs will not be accomplished simply by superimposing western concepts of enlightened¹ military professionalism or police reform on Africa. Western concepts of military professionalism imply a perennial search for institutional autonomy that contradicts the notion of tight political control. The latter is in many instances essential for regime survival in the developing world. This is bound to create a high level of tension where foreign training programmes are prescribed as a key component of African security sector reform. Given the status quo, the major challenge in the proper regulation of Africa's security agencies lies first and foremost in appropriate role definition ­ what are these structures for, as opposed to what we were told they were against during the colonial era. There is a cogent need to redefine security in terms that are relevant to Africa - as opposed to the cold war requirements of the former two superpowers or those of the former colonial countries ­ and to design and manage accordingly.

Ideally such an approach should be rooted squarely within that of human security¹ ­ an approach the refers to the safety and wellbeing of people, individuals and communities rather than that of government alone. Without it, territorial integrity and state security become hollow shells. As the necessary complement to state security, human security brings people-centered considerations into the core of the elements that constitute a peaceful and stable society. And while there is a growing number of definitions of human security and debates over its conceptual grounding, its people-centered focus remains its most powerful attribute. At the inter-state level the central strategic problem in Africa is not deterrence, as in the Cold War, but reassurance. Unlike deterrence, which relies on strategic interaction between opposing states, the key to reassurance is reliable normative and institutional structures. The appropriate framework for weak countries is that of a comprehensive approach to regional security and stability that emphasises transparency, confidence building mechanisms and co-operative engagement of its neighbours ­ and that builds on an approach that provides domestic security first. The challenge is therefore not that of collective defence, but collaborative security. It is to this endeavour that regional capacity building efforts should turn.

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