Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO DATE: 8/5/2007
Africa: Confronting Complex Threats
2007 February
Abstract
Africa is grappling with several difficult security challenges. These difficulties result not only from the magnitude of these challenges, but also from the lack of capacity of African states and organizations to respond quickly and effectively to them. While wide swathes of Africa are compelled to deal with problems in an ad hoc manner, there are indications that some states, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and the African Union (AU) are undertaking promising steps to respond. Some of Africa’s core security challenges are (a) the legacy of historic notions of state sovereignty; (b) the rise of regionalism in the absence of common regional values; (c) the difficulty of managing hegemonic regionalism; (d) elitism in the form of regional integration occurring only at the level of leaders without permeating the consciousness of the people; (e) the creation of institutions with little or no capacity to manage them, resulting in a merely formal regionalism; and finally (f) the perception of regionalism as an externally driven project.1
Within this context of regionalism and the challenges posed to cooperative security in Africa, a number of factors become central to the success of the process of entrenching cooperative security, if Africa is to move beyond its present formalism. Some of the key elements that need to be considered in any scenario building are (a) understanding the nature of the post-colonial state and the nation-building project in Africa; (b) subscribing to and institutionalizing core regional values and norms; (c) focusing on deepening democratic and open governance; (d) strengthening developmental regionalism as a means of addressing the negative aspects of globalization; (e) establishing the parameters of genuine continental and global partnerships – including role clarification between subregional bodies, the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations.
