Thinking about security in Africa

International Affairs

Volumn 83, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 1021-1038

  Williams, Paul D ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35548964271     PISSN: 00205850     EISSN: 14682346     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2007.00671.x     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Foreign Policy magazine/Fund for Peace, "The Failed States Index 2007', www.fundforpeace.org, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
2. The 20 regimes are those that scored the worst rating of 7 for either political rights or civil liberties. This list does not include Morocco's rule over Western Sahara, which also falls into this category. See Freedom House, 'Freedom in the World 2007', at www.freedomhouse.org, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
3. UN Development Programme, 'Human Development Index 2006', http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
4. For an up-to-date overview see Paul D. Williams, ed., Security studies: an introduction (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
5. Ken Booth has been the pioneer of this approach. See his 'Security and emancipation', Review of International Studies 17: 3, 1991, pp. 313-26 and Theory of world security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
6. These questions and much of the inspiration for my approach can be found in Ken Booth and Peter Vale, ' Critical Security Studies and regional insecurity : the case of southern Africa', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds, Critical Security Studies (London: UCL Press, 1997), pp. 329-58.
7. Booth, Theory of world security, ch. 3.
8. On the limited political breathing space in Africa for civil society, see Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa works: disorder as a political instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999).
9. Freedom House, 'Freedom in the World 2007', at www.freedomhouse.org, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
10. Bill McSweeney, Security, identity and interests: a sociology of international relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 33, 16.
11. Richard Wyn Jones, '"Message in a bottle?" Theory and praxis in Critical Security Studies', Contemporary Security Policy 16:3, 1995, p. 309.
12. Edward Said, Representations of the intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 84.
13. Booth and Vale, 'Critical Security Studies', p. 344.
14. Chabal and Daloz, Africa works.
15. See Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds, The lie of the land: challenging received wisdom on the African environment (Oxford : James Currey, 1996).
16. e.g. the AU Assembly Decision, 29-30 Jan. 2007, Addis Ababa, Assembly/AU/Dec.134 (VIII); Ban Ki-moon, 'A climate culprit in Darfur', Washington Post, 16 June 2007, p. A15.
17. See Jean-François Bayart, 'Africa in the world: a history of extroversion', African Affairs 99: 395, 2000, pp. 217-67;
18. William Reno, Warlord politics and African states (Boulder, CO : Lynne Rienner, 1998).
19. J. R. McNeill, Something new under the sun: an environmental history of the twentieth-century world (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 335.
20. McNeill, Something new under the sun, pp. 16, 4.
21. McNeill, Something new under the sun, p. 271.
22. UN Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2006 (New York : UNDP, 2006), p. 55.
23. McNeill, Something new under the sun, p. 283.
24. McNeill, Something new under the sun, pp. 285-6.
25. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 38.
26. See Nicholas Shaxson, Poisoned wells: the dirty politics of African oil (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
27. The US government's decision to lift most of its remaining sanctions against Libya in September 2004 prompted renewed activity there by US oil companies such as Chevron and Occidental Petroleum.
28. Wall Street Journal, cited in Michael Klare and Daniel Volman, 'The African "oil rush" and US national security', Third World Quarterly 27: 4, 2006, p. 610.
29. Klare and Volman, 'The African "oil rush'".
30. Jeffrey Herbst, States and power in Africa (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2000), p. II.
31. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, 'Religion and politics : taking African epistemologies seriously', Journal of Modern African Studies 45: 3, 2007, p. 387.
32. See also Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, Worlds of power: religious thought and political practice in Africa (London: Hurst, 2004).
33. Booth and Vale, 'Critical Security Studies', p. 336.
34. Compare, for example, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, 'On the incidence of civil war in Africa', Journal of Conflict Resolution 46: 1, 2002, pp. 13-28
35. with Reno, Warlord politics;
36. Paul Richards, ed., No peace, no war: anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), esp. chs 1, 6-8 ;
37. Preben Kaarsholm, ed., Violence, political culture and development in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2006).
38. See The Human Security Report 2005: war and peace in the 21st century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
39. The database is available at www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/iudex.htm, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
40. See e.g. Jeffrey Herbst, 'Economic incentives, natural resources and conflict in Africa', Journal of African Economies 9:3, 2000, pp. 270-94;
41. Morten Bøås and Kevin Dunn, 'African guerrilla politics', in Morten Baas and Kevin Dunn, eds, African guerrillas (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007), pp. 9-38.
42. Robert H. Jackson, 'The security dilemma in Africa', in Brian L. Job, ed., The (In)security dilemma (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 81-94. The security dilemma in international politics refers to the tragic way in which uncertainty may lead decision-makers to be fearful of others' intentions and thus engage in behaviour that assumes the malign intent of the other party while simultaneously expecting their own actions to be seen as purely defensive. In extreme cases, the resulting spiral of insecurity may result in two parties engaging in warfare when neither side originally intended to harm the other.
43. A point made in Booth and Vale, 'Critical Security Studies', p. 348. See also Eboe Hutchful and Kwesi Aning, 'The political economy of conflict', in Adekeye Adebajo and Ismail Rashid, eds, West Africa's security challenges (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), pp. 195-222.
44. For an interesting attempt to do precisely this, see Jeffrey Herbst's 'Responding to state failure in Africa', International Security 21:3, 1996/7, pp. 120-44,
45. and 'Let them fail', in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., When states fail: causes and consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 302-18.
46. Hedley Bull, The anarchical society (London: Macmillau, 1977), p. 146.
47. For more details, see Nana Poku, AIDS in Africa (Cambridge: Polity, 2006),
48. and Alex de Waal, Aids and power (London: Zed, 2006).
49. UNAIDS, Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic: Executive Summary (Geneva: UNAIDS, 2006), p. 6.
50. Nana K. Poku and Alan Whiteside, '25 years of living with HIV/AIDS : challenges and prospects', International Affairs 82: 2, 2006, p. 250.
51. Under Article 5. 1(i) of the amended 2001 version of the Treaty of the SADC, one of the organization's objectives is to 'combat HIV/AIDS or other deadly and communicable diseases'. The SADC discussed HIV/AIDS as a challenge with major security and defence-related dimensions in its Strategic Indicative Plan fir the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation (SADC, 2004), www.sadc.int/english/documents/sipo/sipo_en.pdf.
52. OAU doc. OAU/SPS/ABUJA/4, 29 April 2001.
53. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 46.
54. See 'The Failed States Index 2007'; the Uppsala Conflict Database; Freedom House, The worst of the worst: the world's most repressive societies 2007 (New York: Freedom House, 2007).
55. For a critical discussion see Paul D. Williams, 'State failure in Africa: causes, consequences and responses', in Africa South of the Sahara 2008 (London : Europa World Yearbook/Taylor & Francis, 2007), www.europaworld.com/entry/ass.essay.8, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
56. http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/, accessed 19 Sept. 2007
57. See UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 156;
58. UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Sudan:post-conflict environmental assessment: synthesis report (Kenya: UNEP, 2007).
59. See Alex de Waal, 'Is climate change the culprit for Darfur?', Social Science Research Council blog, 25 June 2007, www.ssrc.org/blog/2007/06/25/is- climate-change-the-culprit-for-darfur/, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
60. Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, FAO Forestry Paper 147 (Rome: FAO, 2006), p. 21.
61. See FAO, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005.
62. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 57.
63. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 135.
64. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 165.
65. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 12.
66. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 15.
67. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 15.
68. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 169.
69. Commission for Africa, Our common interest (London: Department for International Development, 2005), p. 50.
70. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p. 58.
71. Peter Vale, Whatever happened to the post-apartheid moment? Past hopes and possible futures for southern Africa (London : Catholic Institute for International Relations, 2004), p. 26.
72. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and powers: the structure of international security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 4.
73. See Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of war: violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
74. For the view that unprotected camps for the displaced are 'the primary determinant of child soldier recruitment rates', see Vera Achvarina and Simon F. Reich, 'No place to hide: refugees, displaced persons, and the recruitment of child soldiers', International Security 31:1, 2006, pp. 127-64.
75. Christopher Clapham, 'Degrees of statehood', Review of International Studies 24: 2, 1998, pp. 143-57.
76. Alex de Waal, ed., Demilitarizing the mind: African agendas for peace and security (Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press, 2002).
77. Royal African Society (RAS), Damage We Do Report (London: RAS, June 2005), http://www.royalafricansociety.org/documents/ras_damagewedo.doc, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.
78. Booth and Vale, 'Critical Security Studies', p. 344.
79. See Michael Burnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the world: international organizations in global politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
80. 'Protocol relating to the establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union' (9 July 2002), article 6(a). The protocol came into force on 26 December 2003 and the PSC officially began its work on 16 March 2004, at the ministerial level, at the margins of the 4th Ordinary Session of the AU Executive Council.
81. 'Protocol relating to the establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union', articles 5(2) (a) and 5(2)(g).
82. The AU authorized the creation of the AU Mission in Burundi (AMIB) in 2003 before the PSC was formally established; see 'Communiqué of the Ninety-first Ordinary Session of the Central Organ of the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution at Ambassadorial Level', Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2 April 2003.
83. For details see www.wacsof.org, accessed 19 Sept. 2007.