REGIONAL AFRICAN PEACEKEEPING CAPACITY:

The concept of peacekeeping was designed to deal with conflict between states and not with internal conflict in countries. It is premised upon the assumption that the disputing states have agreed to international assistance to help them live in peace and regain stability. No major African peacekeeping operation, whether undertaken by the United Nations or anyone else, has thus far been of this nature. 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 is the permeability of African state 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 are simply incapable of controlling their own territory and of ending cross-border actions, particularly when international boundaries cut through rather than follow broad ethnic and tribal divides.

The response of the international community to the challenge of instability in Africa is generally held hostage by the state-centred peacekeeping debate. It is to peacekeeping that commentators turn when looking for solutions to violent crises that are very different from those envisaged at the end of World War IIwhen the UN Charter was drafted. At that time, it was interstate war that had to be contained and avoided in a world threatened by the potential catastrophe of mutually assured nuclear destruction. The international community was remarkably successful in meeting this challenge, but as the end of the 20th century draws close, it is evident that the globe needs to revisit the fundamentals of the international system and the tools that it wishes to use in order to avoid, manage and end conflict.

This article argues that there is a global trend towards the use of subregional organisations and/or ‘coalitions of the willing and able’ to undertake peace enforcement operations under the guise of peacekeeping in the backyard of regional powers. This trend, particularly evident in Africa, needs to be unpacked and exposed, given the limited potential of state-centred, region-based initiatives in empowering weak and unconsolidated states to provide security in a region where these states cannot do so within their own territories.

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 the UN 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 thrust upon it by the demise of the Soviet Union.

The most recent and arguably the most important indication of this trend is the US’s drive for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to undertake so-called non-Article 5 missions and its support for a greater ‘European defence identity’ as opposed to a transatlantic identity. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty spells out the core mission of NATO, that of collective defence of the member states according to which an attack on one is considered as an attack on all.

Having commemorated its fiftieth anniversary in April 1999, crisis management and peace support missions by NATO within the broad alliance’s ‘sphere of influence’ — i.e. beyond the territorial boundaries of its member countries — are increasingly considered as core functions of the alliance. The US is at the forefront of efforts to limit NATO enlargement that would undermine its efficacy in acting coherently beyond collective defence requirements, for example in situations such as Kosovo.

In the debate on the future of the alliance, the US, strongly supported by Britain, is pushing NATO to include ‘crisis response operations’ as a core function. This is in opposition to the argument of countries such as France (and most middle powers, including the Scandinavian countries), that non-Article 5 missions require a specific UN Security Council mandate. Article 53 of the UN Charter states that a Security Council mandate is required for each and every peace enforcement mission undertaken by subregional organisations — which would include NATO, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and subregional organisations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

For Africa, these developments have profound implications. It is here that the US sought the most obvious application of the doctrine of burden-sharing and collaboration. At first, this occurred through the so-called African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) — an initiative that followed the US experience in Somalia and the lack of international action during the genocide in Rwanda and in events in Burundi.

Over time, the obvious intent of the ACRF gave way to a more nuanced approach, now termed the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), within which the US trains selected African military elements for participation in peacekeeping operations. This training is conducted in accordance with the inappropriate concept of consensual peacekeeping operations developed for interstate conflicts. It is inappropriate, because few, if any peacekeeping operations in Africa would qualify as consensual where two opposing sides have agreed to a cease-fire and called upon the international community for intervention and assistance. Consensual peacekeeping training, however, does provide a politically acceptable mantra within which Africa can be helped to look after its own problems. For US policymakers, this is particularly important given the domestic resistance within the country against direct military assistance to non-democratic countries after the US’s experiences in supporting the armed forces of some governments in Central and South America. The purpose and intent remain the same — train African soldiers to bring stability to Africa.

Generally, the international community does not yet have an appropriate politically acceptable and affordable response to the challenge of failed states or even of dealing with so-called ‘complex emergencies’ apart from the provision of humanitarian assistance. As a result, peacekeeping in Africa is only applicable to a limited number of contingencies and ignores the challenge of restoring stability in situations characterised by a power vacuum, massive internal social dislocation and competing warlords rather than opposing political movements and associated armed forces.

Part and parcel of this approach by the US and others is to find an international legal basis for military action by an organisation such as NATO when faced with future crises where these countries’ interests are at stake. For some time, it appeared as if NATO’s involvement in Kosovo was to be the litmus test for an approach that built on the evolving principles of humanitarian law and the need for military action to avoid large-scale human tragedy as a means to such an end. By using this approach, a precedent could be set where non-Article 5 operations by NATO would not require an unequivocal Security Council mandate.

While supporters of the UN abhor an approach that effectively seeks to bypass the UN and the Security Council in particular, it is the very inability of the UN and the international community to reach consensus and react or act in sufficient time that is the core driving force behind these developments. While many hold NATO in breach of international law in Kosovo, it is equally clear that the UN has proven incapable of acting in instances such as Rwanda. It was also initially given short thrift by South Africa in the case of its recent intervention in Lesotho as well as by many African states that interfere and ‘assist’ other countries under a dubious international mandate or non-existent bilateral defence treaty. The UN is, of course, no more than the sum of its members and is ultimately held hostage by those countries with the resources and will to commit these in support of the world body.

There is nothing new in an approach that seeks to build global security on a strategy of co-option and devolution of responsibility from what remains a weak international system of conflict prevention and management. For the US, it is pragmatic and rational for a global superpower that is careful not to overextend itself, yet sufficiently aware of the outside world to realise that it cannot prosper in a globalised world characterised by widespread abject poverty and escalating cycles of violence. And there is every indication that the original US intent in the establishment of a force for Africa by Africa has gained a significant recent momentum on the continent that is caught, as it is, between the lack of international action and the requirement to try and do something to stabilise violent crises.

The international community has long been unwilling to concede and discuss the extent of structural collapse in many African societies, and the fundamentals that underlie the trend. The whole structure of diplomacy, international recognition and indeed of peacekeeping rests on the state as the cornerstone and building block of international law and international relations. Heads of state, in little more than the titular meaning of the word, participate in and are accorded the same status, in practice and in law, as elected leaders of consolidated democracies. At the same time, many of the policies of the traditional donor countries and the structure of the global financial system condemn the poorest of the poor to remain locked in apparent eternal poverty. The result is a façade and a sense of the inviolability of the nature of state borders while leaders conceal or simply refuse to acknowledge the extent of state collapse.

This present situation, of course, has its basis in history. Most colonial states did not make any effort to extend the administrative apparatus of government much beyond the capital city. The bias in favour of the urban areas continued after independence and was maintained throughout the Cold War during which unconditional support for essentially dysfunctional states governed by an illegitimate élite served the interests of both the East and the West.

The distinction between state and government has little tradition in much of Africa. Security principally means regime security where governments appropriate state organisations. Police and military functions are not properly separated, riot control and counterinsurgency are not distinguished. The control of resources, patronage and the means of coercion comes into the hands of privileged individuals, and is a method of political reward. The next step — the quasi-privatisation of the state, as in the former Zaire, for example — is but a matter of degree: the path is prepared almost everywhere.1

By the 1990s, 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 its unique disposal. 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. At the same time, the security agencies themselves, in many instances, have decayed and lost their coherence. A military victory by any of the various armed forces in a country such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is, as a result, unlikely to have any impact on levels of social violence, social fragmentation and the nature of the economy.

Today, the surfeit of arms and the lack of control over national territories have resulted in much of sub-Saharan Africa being characterised not by the state’s monopoly over the instruments of coercion, but by a balance of force between the state and the community. The result, on a highly armed and violent continent, is ironically the creation of a security vacuum. In Nairobi, Johannesburg or Luanda, security is available to those who can afford it. For Angola, Sierra Leone and the DRC, 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, ethnic-based politicians or criminals.

Lock2 argues that "... the conflict is over the creation and control of a new local-global economic space, which is no longer burdened with the ballast of an exhausted territorial nation-state ... new alliances are being formed during ongoing armed conflicts between the sub-state, international, and supranational actors which labour in the midst of fighting to develop competitive production locations for the global market, no matter whether the access routes are legal or criminal. With the local monopoly of coercion being the precondition to advance such projects, successful warlords become indispensable partners. All this is possible because sub-state units are able to interact with the world market on their own, and in defiance of a formal state, without fearing sanctions in this era of deregulation."

Despite the changes in the nature of the African state, the response of the international community to conflict in Africa has been a never-ending process of redefining the concept of state-based peacekeeping. In only a few peacekeeping missions in Africa have states in conflict consented to these missions, to the use of peacekeepers as impartial brokers or to the use of force by peacekeepers only in self-defence — the tenets of traditional peacekeeping. Clapham3 remarks that, as a result,

" ... peacekeepers in Africa have been plunged into the most intractable problems in attempting to maintain some kind of order ... For them the relatively straightforward tasks of merely policing agreements between states are not an option. They have been called on, rather, to prop up (or re-create) collapsing states; to intervene in vicious civil wars; and to negotiate and, if need be, enforce peace settlements among conflicting parties whose commitment to any peaceful resolution of conflicts was often at best extremely uncertain, and at worst no more than a façade behind which to prepare a resumption of hostilities."

Other initiatives, all based on the state, subregional and regional organisations, have included unsuccessful efforts to establish early warning systems that share intelligence among state agencies for use by regional and international organisations. The UN has not been able to establish an integrated intelligence system. UN peacekeeping operations have to conduct information gathering and share activities under all types of pretexts and the early warning system in the Centre for Conflict Management at the OAU remains more a myth than a reality. In those rare instances where states have been prepared to share the most modest of information among themselves and with regional organisations, the knowledge of an impending conflict has seldom translated into the political will to act. Inevitably, national rivalries and suspicions have undercut any attempts at real information sharing at regional and international levels.

The establishment of ad hoc commissions of heads of state to mediate or bring regional pressures to bear on countries in conflict has also characterised African initiatives, very evident in the case of a country such as Burundi. Other initiatives include the expanded concept of political mediation with a veritable explosion in the appointment of special envoys over extended periods of time. Recently, the UN and the OAU have taken to the practice of appointing a joint envoy as was the case recently in the Great Lakes region. Hesitantly and reluctantly, the OAU has also had to try and deploy its own military observer missions to countries such as Rwanda, Burundi and the Comoros.

Part and parcel of these trends has been a blurring in the clear demarcation of roles between subregional, regional and international organisations — the UN in particular — after the end of the Cold War. During the bipolar 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.

While is it possible for the UN to remain impartial in issues concerning two or more of its member states, as Clapham has argued elsewhere, it is scarcely possible for the UN to remain impartial when one or more of the conflicting parties is not a state and when it is dealing with a conflict that is essentially within as opposed to between states.4 The criteria for international legal recognition as a government by neighbouring countries and the international community are often very practical and rudimentary. Since the UN Charter is based on non-interference in the domestic affairs of countries except when such affairs constitute a threat to international peace and security, no standards are effectively applied regarding the nature of government succession. Generally legal recognition follows control of a limited number of state institutions such as the central government offices and public broadcaster. As a result, legal succession of statehood is often bestowed or gained by governments or factions with little real legitimate claim to such succession.

Peacekeeping is, arguably, only one among many responses to potential or actual interstate conflict. Its application is limited and there is a wealth of experience regarding those conditions within which peacekeeping has proven unsuccessful. Yet, the term remains a popular one internationally and arguably provides the mantra under which the vast majority of international efforts to bring peace to conflict are discussed. It should therefore come as little surprise that the most well-known efforts by donor countries to support stability in Africa fall under the broad rubric of peacekeeping.

Often cited as the most important of the developments within the realm of conflict prevention in Africa is the decision by the OAU to institute the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution in 1993. The Mechanism provides for the establishment of a central decision-making body, the Central Organ, and the establishment of the Centre for Conflict Management. Within the OAU, the office of the Secretary General and the Centre are responsible for the implementation and secretarial functions of the Mechanism. The primary objective of the OAU Mechanism is to ‘anticipate and prevent conflicts’. The Mechanism is mandated to undertake political, economic and humanitarian activities to build peace in post-conflict situations to prevent the recurrence of further conflict in Africa. In tandem with the establishment of the OAU Mechanism, African leaders also agreed to the establishment of a Peace Fund to fund conflict prevention and resolution efforts. A number of peacekeeping capacity-building initiatives have followed these decisions.

During May 1997, France, Britain and the US formally agreed to co-ordinate their respective peacekeeping capacity-building initiatives. Over time this became known as the P3 initiative because of the involvement of three permanent members of the UN. The initiative co-ordinates French support for the establishment of a rapid intervention force to be deployed in emergency humanitarian situations (Renforcement des capacités africaines de maintien de la paix — RECAMP), British support in building peacekeeping capacity and the provision of training, and the ACRI. On 5 December 1997, largely at the initiative of the US, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) convened the first meeting in New York to discuss the enhancement of peacekeeping capability and international co-operation and co-ordination in Africa. The result was the creation of the Africa Peacekeeping Support Group at the UN and enhanced donor co-ordination, but the total amount of resources committed to peacekeeping capacity-building has not been increased.

The second meeting of the OAU Chiefs of Defence Staff in Harare during 1997 had earlier recommended that peacekeeping capacity-building should be undertaken in an integrated manner at subregional level.5 Although the meeting also recommended that capacity building include programmes to enhance humanitarian participation, civilian policing and related matters, it has traditionally only been the Scandinavian countries and Canada that have included a focus outside of the military.

The latest in these endeavours was Exercise Blue Crane in South Africa that followed upon Exercise Blue Hungwe in Zimbabwe in 1997 and Exercise Guidimakha in Senegal during February 1998. Over time, most of the subregions have been able to indicate their ability to run rudimentary peace mission exercises with sufficient donor support. This rather flimsy ability to co-operate in the most basic of peacekeeping techniques is often used by donors to showcase the ability of Africans to keep the peace in Africa — and therefore justify the devolution of responsibility to Africans.

According to an International Peace Academy meeting held at the OAU at the end of 1998, "[t]he oft-trumpeted international [peacekeeping training] initiatives are usually very minimal in impact and quite marginal in funding."6 Commentators and many African governments and regional organisations regularly question the emphasis on training Africans for peace missions when an equal requirement is the provision of logistics and equipment for such missions.

Most conflict management capacity-building efforts, including the assistance provided to the Conflict Management Division of the OAU in Addis Ababa, are therefore state-centred on a continent where states are often weak, predatory and incapable of providing either security or basic services to the majority of their citizens. Inevitably, subregional and continental structures reflect and sometimes even amplify the porous state foundations upon which they depend.

At the turn of the century, however, it is becoming apparent that Africa is increasingly intent on engaging and dealing with its own challenges and that the phrase ‘African solutions to African problems’ may yet come to haunt the continent. In a number of regions, nascent subregional and regional structures for conflict management are developing. All, including the Conflict Management Division at the OAU, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Mechanism,7 the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security/Inter-State Defence and Security Committee, are weak. The fallacy that subregional approaches may provide security where the state and the international community cannot, has found increased support in Africa in recent years.

The Declaration of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government on the Establishment within the OAU of a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution that met in Cairo during June 1993, for example, referred only to "... civilian and military missions of observation and monitoring of limited scope and duration ..." At the time of the second meeting of the Chiefs of Defence Staff in Harare in 1997, the recommendations included reference to the fact that in

During a recent meeting on peacemaking and peacekeeping at the OAU, discussions centred on strengthening the ability of the OAU and subregional organisations to act. Citing the decision by the Harare Summit to oppose the 1997 coup d’état in Sierra Leone, the meeting identified a groundswell of support in favour of "... interference by the OAU Secretary General in the internal matters of Member States under special circumstances ... [namely]:

Increasingly, it is to the OAU and not to the UN that African leaders wish to turn on issues of peace and security. In this process, the debate on the continent is enthusiastic about the complementary role that subregional organisations can play in maintaining peace and security in the various subregions and the role that the latter can play in peacekeeping.

But if the constituent components of the whole are weak in many cases, what chance is there that subregional groupings and African ‘coalitions of the willing’ would be able to make a significant contribution to stability?

Despite the well-established principles of impartiality within the peacekeeping debate, the underlying assumption when it comes to the new enthusiasm for a greater role for subregional organisations, is that they are closer to a conflict and therefore more familiar with local conditions. An organisation such as SADC or ECOWAS should therefore have a comparative advantage to play the lead role in the termination of such conflicts. In reality, it has only been the hegemonic position of a country such as Nigeria that has allowed it to conduct operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone or South Africa’s dominance of the region that allows it to interfere in Lesotho. In contrast even to NATO, subregional peacekeeping and intervention in Africa is often dependent upon the dominance of a single powerful country as opposed to the combined efforts of a number of consolidated nation-states. As a result, a country such as Nigeria provides the essential vehicle for ECOMOG and South Africa goes through the motions of consulting its SADC partners before intervening in Lesotho under a regional pretext.

For several years, donor assistance to subregions has been driven by the myth of the capacity and capabilities of subregional organisations such as SADC, ECOWAS and the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to muster, co-ordinate and sustain subregional forces. This myth has been exploded most evidently in Southern Africa where the much vaunted Organ on Politics, Defence and Security does not even qualify as a talking shop. The reality is that most African states have small armed forces that are often ill-equipped, poorly trained by international peacekeeping standards, poorly led, élitist, prone to intervention in the domestic political affairs of the country and with a strong emphasis on internal security concerns. Yet, it is these poor states, as in the case of West Africa, that the international community expects to execute, fund and resource peacekeeping in the subregion. Hutchful, who has written extensively on the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), summarises the West African experience:

In the case of Southern Africa, the conflict in the DRC has balkanised SADC, split between opposing factions in support of, opposition to or aiming to stay neutral or uninvolved in the widening war. The lack of a permanent secretariat and the impasse over its status and mandate point to the obvious lack of an underlying common political will and value system in the region. With the expansion of SADC to include the DRC, the Community was significantly weakened and has probably ceased to have the potential to serve as either a vehicle for regional economic or security integration. While ECOWAS demonstrated a remarkable tenacity in staying engaged in Liberia and Sierra Leone, this reflects the ability of Nigeria, a dominant power then under military rule, where scant attention needed to be paid to domestic opinion and indeed to issues regarding the use of the public purse. This is not an option available to a democratic South Africa and will not be possible for a democratic Nigeria under civilian rule.

As yet, there is no research conducted on "... understanding how involvement in peacekeeping influences political processes in those states which are themselves engaged in these operations. What does involvement in protracted and expensive peacekeeping operations imply for weak states and for their own fiscal and resource viability and state-building processes? How do such states deal with the stresses and responsibilities of regional peacekeeping? How are decisions to launch or sustain peacekeeping operations taken? Why do some regimes become involved and others stay the course?"13

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.

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 ‘doing something’ short of committing own ground forces and all the risks that such an operation would incur. Britain already provides some limited logistic support to ECOMOG in Sierra Leone while the US funds the operation.

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.14 Whereas the debate was obsessed with mercenaries and all the emotive and ideological baggage that accompanied this term until recently, 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.

Regional peacekeeping capacity-building programmes will also 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 for 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 DRC in support of rebel forces.

But building peacekeeping capacity cannot and will not be much more than symbolically valuable at a time when the fundamental challenge is that of statebuilding. While such endeavours may help African armed forces to build regional confidence and stability, the need for statebuilding inevitably means a return to basics — and it is here that Africans need to recapture their own destiny in a concrete manner.

The African political and academic élite need to reconceptualise the role and mission of their security agencies. This will inevitably be a slow and cumbersome process that requires an alternative approach and discussion to that which have applied so far. In the process, the primary focus of security agencies should be on domestic stability and control — not in isolation from regional approaches, but as the fundamental building blocks for any adequate system to enhance regional security.

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 the larger and more important challenge in the light of the extent of continued state collapse in much of Africa. Encouraging non-democratic weak states to assist other non-democratic weak states in the provision of security without an unequivocal and significant involvement of the international community may have unintended consequences over time — serving to 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, in particular, with an essentially non-domestic security orientation.

Africa’s armed forces are basically colonial institutions that served to police the colonial empire’s interests of which some were enlisted as cheap cannon fodder during the two World Wars. After independence, the new élite had a strong interest in leaving the inherited borders untouched, since their position depended on the maintenance of the status quo and the pretence of heading a nation-state. For their part, the armed forces of sub-Saharan Africa were eager to adopt the role of symbolic guardian of the nation, charged with the task of external defence. However, they were often exclusively engaged in internal security, particularly as general economic conditions deteriorated. At the same time, professional standards declined along with the social status of the military, not least because military budgets were shrinking, and the military were politicised and often misused. The mismatch and dissonance between intended and actual role fulfilment when it comes to African armed forces, have been long-standing and underresearched areas within political-military and military sociological studies.

As if this were not enough, the continuing debate on how to cope with violence in Africa mostly ignores the problem that police forces are generally in a miserable shape. Social science has given surprisingly little attention to African police forces, in stark contrast to the large body of literature on the role of the military. "When the police are discussed, it is usually in relation to the military, compared to whom they are seen academically as the poor relation: lower in status, educational level, resources and discipline, and less prone to political intervention."15 During the Cold War, the way in which political leaders were policing their countries scarcely mattered, as long as the regime was not in danger of being overthrown.

As Lock has argued, the weak state structure and extremely low remuneration pave the way for the inevitable deterioration of policing in the context of fragmenting states. The police increasingly turn towards illegal but lucrative activities. What has been described as ‘sobels’ in Sierra — soldiers who turn rebels at night — has its equivalent in ‘pobers’ - police officers who turn into robbers at night and other times. The syndrome of predatory policing is widespread in Africa and not restricted to war-torn countries. In Kenya, this expression of social fragmentation seems to fester in extremes. Kenya provides a case of direct colonial lineage in the organisation of the police. It also demonstrates that extreme social fragmentation and formal democratic procedures can co-exist.17

The transformation from essentially predatory and antiquated security agencies to those that can serve Africa’s needs will not be accomplished simply by superimposing Western concepts of ‘enlightened’ 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.18

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 they were seemingly 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.

Africa needs to revisit the fundamentals upon which it bases its security paradigm. Civil-military relations and reform of the criminal justice system cannot be separated from the broader processes of peacebuilding, democratisation and good governance in those countries that are undergoing post-conflict reconstruction and/or seeking to avoid the proliferation of those problems that give rise to these conflicts. Indeed, the question of establishing stable and robust civil-military relations is inseparably part of the process of improving governance and the skills that are required to ensure good governance.

At the interstate 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 of collaborative security.

Clearly, a nation’s own security must consider that of its neighbours — and it must be achieved in collaboration with them. Security can also not be isolated from a respect for human rights, participatory governance and the rule of law. Security and stability cannot be separated from the development of economic, environmental, scientific and technical co-operation, as well as from social justice.

At the national level, many African countries and members of the African élite need to revisit the colonial legacy of the use of the armed forces, in particular. This process will soon show that armed forces should best be seen as instruments of crisis intervention and crisis prevention — nationally and regionally — and should focus on limited assistance to other security agencies nationally to the point of assuming functions such as border security, riot control and the like — and that their nature, equipment and composition should reflect these concerns.

Africans also need to discuss, debate and investigate the linkages between security and development at every opportunity.

The continent needs to establish an effective network of serious, applied policy work in the field of conflict management that can open up the debate and competently and professionally interact with governments and regional organisations, as well as serve as effective civil-society counterbalances to state institutions. The emphasis here is on the counterbalance to the state by an informed civil society, the intellectual input into the process of providing collaborative instead of competitive security on the continent — particularly at national, subregional and continental level. Without this, it will be impossible to develop a mature, meaningful and indigenous security paradigm. Only a very small number of countries such as South Africa have, comparatively speaking, a strong and vibrant civil society, with some potential to serve as a source for capacity-building in the rest of Africa.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, there is less appetite among overseas powers to donate equipment and expertise to maintain or enhance the operational capability of the forces of other states. With no vital or strategic interests at stake in Africa, the Permanent Five Security Council members have proven increasingly reluctant to risk their soldiers’ lives in Africa. Even France has indicated that it can no longer afford to mount costly military interventions each time trouble erupts in Francophone Africa, nor can it maintain garrisons in Africa on the same scale that it had done previously.

This article argues that there is a global trend towards the use of subregional organisations and/or ‘coalitions of the willing and able’ to undertake peace enforcement under the guise of peacekeeping in the backyard of regional powers. This trend is particularly evident in Africa where a number of countries have engaged in capacity-building initiatives to strengthen African peacekeeping capabilities. These initiatives are generally state-centred and consist of donor countries seeking to capacitate weak and unconsolidated states to provide security in the region where these states cannot do so within their own territory.

The stated preference is to build African capacity to deal with Africa’s crises. Given the immense gulf in equipment and training that separates organisations such as NATO from subregional organisations in Africa, it seems inevitable that the result will be the development of a two-tiered system of global peacekeeping — one set of standards for the developed world and another for Africa. And different criteria may open the doors for less scrupulous players who rely on force of arms and coercion rather than a careful mandate from the UN Security Council. After Somalia, the disinclination of even heavily armed American-led NATO forces in Bosnia to undertake any activity that might risk casualties — much less to engage in actual war-fighting — stand in marked contrast to the role of the Nigerian-led peacekeeping forces in Liberia and especially in Sierra Leone. Similarly, African leaders such as Presidents dos Santos (Angola), Nujoma (Namibia), Museveni (Uganda), Mugabe (Zimbabwe) and others are prepared to have their armed forces sustain casualties in neighbouring countries to a degree that is unthinkable in the developed world. It thus seems that, at least in environments where high-technology weaponry is no substitute for the common foot soldier, the developed world has ample armaments and little stomach for their use, while African peacekeeping forces lack not the will, but sometimes the tools.

Given the weakness of many state structures across large swathes of Africa and the predatory nature of those African governments that labour under domestic military or de facto one-party control, little faith can be placed in subregional structures for enhancing regional stability on the continent. Eventually donors will have to rethink their focus on regional and state-centred capacity-building initiatives in favour of approaches that first seek to support the provision of security within rather than among states. The analysis therefore supports the trend towards the use of development aid in accordance with the ‘security first’ approach and for the purposes of security sector reform — with the caveat that these initiatives should be accompanied by a redefinition of the fundamental premises governing the utility and use of security agencies in Africa. In this process, African states need to break away from the colonial legacy and inherited constructs of security, roles and tasks and rethink the nature of security on the continent.

Until such a time as war and conflict in Africa return to more acceptable levels that ‘allow’ international involvement, Africans will inevitably have to ‘fend for themselves’ - in whatever manner, as they are indeed doing in countries such as the DRC, Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, Sudan, Niger, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Algeria, Uganda and others. Hutchful has termed this the start of the era of ‘lean peacekeeping’. This is the real as opposed to the mythical construct of ‘building African peacekeeping capacity’. Co-option and burden-sharing are small parts of these trends, but until African countries come to terms with internal security even this support will be of a more symbolic than real nature. In the meanwhile, a greater emphasis and focus on the provision of domestic security, and donor assistance to this end rather than regional initiatives alone, will provide much more significant returns on investment.