SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA

In the ten years since the establishment of South Africa's first inclusive democratic government, an ambitious, extensive and systematic process of reform has been carried out in the governance of security. The process is widely regarded as having been successful and a model for other processes of ‘security sector reform’ in the context of transitions from authoritarian forms of governance to democratic ones.

That this been achieved with hardly a shot fired in anger is a remarkable achievement and a credit to visionary political leadership as well as organisational capacity, in other words to effective security governance.

At the same time, progress has been uneven and sometimes fragmentary, policy intentions and commitments have not always been translated into practice, the end results have not been to everyone's liking, and transformation has engendered its own pathologies. Thus several challenges remain in improving security governance.

This article provides a broad overview of the roles played by the various actors in the governance of the security sector, including the executive, parliament and civil society. It examines the main policy frameworks and touches on organisational transformation, because it is impossible to deal with governance in isolation from these issues. Policy processes and the frameworks they give rise to—in particular—are critical for effective governance. This article deals with the defence, safety and security and intelligence fields. A comprehensive overview would need to include the governance of criminal justice and foreign policy. The article does not seek to make an overall evaluation of governance, but to identify achievements, shortfalls and challenges.     

TERRORISM AND AFRICA

Since the events of 11 September, regional organisations around the globe have realigned themselves to confront the new security threats posed by terrorism. While these threats can, and do, affect southern Africa in many ways, there has yet to be strong action taken at a regional level, and commitments to dealing with the issue have been varied. This essay attempts to explore why terrorism should demand more attention from southern African states, and reasons why those states should confront the issue through regional apparatuses.

It also examines areas that the SADC region will have to fine-tune in order to successfully implement security measures against terrorism. The essay seeks to take stock of the present capacity within the region as well as learn from what other regions around the world are doing. It highlights how other regions have already taken steps to mitigate their collective vulnerabilities by emphasising coordination, cooperation and harmonization among members. The essay highlights how, by integrating international models with existing regional capacity, southern African states can—and should—begin to confront the threats that terrorism poses to the region.     

TRENDS AND MARKERS

The twin concepts of secrecy and transparency are central to any discourse on the freeness and fairness of elections, because they are universally accep ted yardsticks of the degree to which elections can be said to be legitimate. Without challenging this truism, this paper explores these concepts as both theoretical constructs and as manifes ted in empirical situations. It will highlight their ideological function and argue that they have an alienating effect in practice. The article will also attempt to show how secrecy and transparency have helped to shape Lesotho's electoral process and the mode of its management, and will also discuss the issues and questions that it raises. Next, the most critical issues in any debate concerning Lesotho's elections and their management are raised, followed by the recommendation of an ideal way of managing elections to serve the interest of voters better. Lastly, the paper demonstrates the danger of depoliticising elections and relegating them to the legal sphere, which only the courts of law are competent to interpret.     

TRENDS AND MARKERS

Africa is severely affected by sub-state terrorism—a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in the crisis facing a number of African states. While the importance of root causes in so-called sub-state terrorism is generally accepted, this issue is hotly contested internationally in debates on terrorism. In fact, both sub-state and transnational terrorism have essentially local causes and linkages, and therefore much of what is categorised as terrorism should be treated more appropriately as insurgencies. Recent events in Somalia are of particular concern, as Western responses to the war on terror may further complicate the domestic situation, with self-fulfilling results. Great care should be exercised by African states in adopting either the language of or the prescribed solutions for transnational terrorism as part of the ‘global war on terror’.     

SOMALIA AND SOMALILAND

The authors consider the recent referral by the UN Security Council of the situation in the western region of Sudan (Darfur) for investigation and prosecution to the International Criminal Court. The paper focuses on the context of this referral, especially since the referral signals a capitulation by the United States of America (which had the power to veto the referral) in the face of worldwide pressure for the United Nations to take action against perpetrators of atrocities in Sudan. In considering the referral, the authors point out that the International Criminal Court has been handed a hot potato. Because it is one of the first cases that the court will hear, the spotlight will be on the court's effectiveness as an instrument of international criminal justice. Sudan is not party to the court's statute, however, and accordingly owes the court no obligation to cooperate in the investigation and prosecution of Sudanese offenders.     

GUNS AND BUTTER

Having developed an arms industry of extraordinary depth and breath of capacity, the advent of the De Klerk presidency in 1989 dramatically affected the South African military establishment and its defence industry as budgets were slashed, procurement came to a standstill and the industry was reorganized. Subsequent majority rule did not auger well for the defence industry, yet, a decade later, by 2004, the armaments industry was not only thriving, but had managed to embed itself in the long-term security vision of the state. Key moments in this process was the inclusive and consultative development of the South African White Paper on Defence in 1996, the Defence Review in 1998, and a White Paper on South African Defence Related Industries the following year. Today the relationship between the industry and the government is again close and South Africa's arms producers constitute an interesting combination of intertwined public and private sector entities, ranging from Armscor, Denel and Defencetek in the public sector to private arms producers embedded in large industrial groupings and a heterogeneous host of smaller autonomous enterprises.     

TRENDS AND MARKERS

Cambodia is a typical example of a post-conflict country where the lack of easily available data to guide policy design is one of the fundamental challenges to be addressed. While Cambodia has benefited from sustained Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) collection and destruction programmes since 1998, these have not been accompanied by any data analysis on the impact of gun proliferation and use or on these destruction programmes. In 2005, the Small Arms Survey (SAS) collected data on firearm morbidity and mortality spanning the last ten years. The objective was to develop methods that can be used for data generation in countries without systematic data collection. Using hospital admissions records and a review of the main English newspaper, the data shows that collection and destruction programmes have made a significant difference to human security in Cambodia. The study also reveals that even where no official data is available in a country, researchers can often derive useful indicators.     

TERRORISM AND AFRICA

This article first looks at the relationship between international terrorism and terrorism in Africa. Since sub-state terrorism is already endemic to Africa, the future threat potential in the continent lies in a complex mixture of sub-national and international terrorism. Africa may come to play a central role in international terrorism. The motivation, means and targets all exist and these opportunities will not go unheeded for much longer. Africa presents both a facilitating environment and a target-rich environment for terrorists that seek to attack the United States, and indeed the global system. The article concludes with some remarks on counter-strategies.     

OF HAWKS AND DOVES

The policies toward countries aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons continue to be heavily contested, differing even among countries that consider nuclear proliferation as one of the main threats to international security. This article maps the actual policies of liberal democracies toward Iran and North Korea along a continuum from confrontation to accommodation. Using data from an expert survey, the authors outline four main findings. First, policies toward both Iran and North Korea have become increasingly confrontational over time. Second, no policy convergence was observed among the states studied; that is, notwithstanding the adoption of joint sanctions, differences remained between states preferring confrontation and those opting for accommodation. Third, states maintained remarkably stable policy profiles over time. Finally, despite obvious differences between the norm violations of North Korea and Iran, states generally followed remarkably similar policies toward both countries. The authors’ findings indicate that states exhibit stable preferences for either confrontation or accommodation toward nuclear aspirants. Although a comprehensive examination of the causes of these policy differences is beyond the scope of this article, the authors present evidence that a major cleavage exists between members and non-members of the Non-Aligned Movement, indicating that the degree to which nuclear aspirants’ sovereignty should be respected is a main issue of contention.     

ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AND CULTURE

We address empirically the question of why international economic sanctions are, or are not, chosen as instruments of foreign policy and the question of what determines their success. We hypothesize that cultural linkages between nations are an important factor in explaining both instrument choice and conflict outcomes. Countries that share significant cultural attributes are found to be less likely to apply economic sanctions against one another than countries lacking such cultural ties. However, it is precisely in the case of culturally similar sender and target nations that sanctions are most likely to succeed.     

STRATEGIC DEFENSE AND ATTACK FOR SERIES AND PARALLEL RELIABILITY SYSTEMS: COMMENT

The contest-theoretic literature on the attack and defense of networks of targets focuses primarily on pure-strategy Nash equilibria. Hausken's 2008 European Journal of Operational Research article typifies this approach, and many of the models in this literature either build upon this model or utilize similar techniques. We show that Hausken's characterization of Nash equilibrium is invalid for much of the parameter space examined and provides necessary conditions for his solution to hold. The complete characterization of mixed-strategy equilibria remains an open problem, although there exist solutions in the literature for special prominent cases.     

BORDER CONTROL AND REGIONALISM

The control over shared borders has become increasingly important as a result of the international trend towards the establishment of free trade areas. While opening up for trade, most of the free trade groupings have concomitantly relinquished border control restrictions for the crossborder movement of their own citizens across internal borders, and have tightened controls at external borders. Border controls must not be seen as preventing the crossborder movement of people and goods, but rather as assistance in regulating orderly legal movement. The free movement of goods and people is essential, for example, if SADC wishes to move towards a free trade area, and to grow and prosper. This article will use recent developments in South Africa to demonstrate the challenges facing the country in implementing effective border control. By implication, it also illustrates the challenges facing SADC in implementing its Protocol on Trade and the region's free trade area launched in 2000. The total liberalisation of the SADC market is expected by 2012. In this process, free trade must be effectively reconciled with appropriate border control.