Security is a contested concept. The idea that security is to be achieved by cooperation more than by confrontation, and that it is an economic and social as well as a military condition, has been a common place of international politics for more than twenty five years. Different scholars have had varying definitions of security. For instance, Bellany has argued that security is a relative freedom from war coupled with relatively high expectations that defeat will not be a consequence of any war that should occur. Walter Lippman, on the other hand, sees security as concerning perceptions of well being of individuals and collectives and of the issuance of the "core values" central to the definition of communities.
Job sees security as having four dimensions; the individual, state, regime and nation. The state has two contexts for reference, an external and internal. Externally, states are the actors in the international system, each with a distinct territorial base and exercising sovereignty. Internally, the state is equated with the set of institutions that organises, regulates and enforces interactions of groups and individuals within its territorial confines. Regime is a small group of elites who hold the highest offices in the state and effectively command the machinery, especially the coercive forces, of the state. Lastly, a nation is the collective of persons whose self identification on the basis of common culture, language, race and historical experiences is viewed as the basis for the expression of legitimate political identity and power. Further, Job goes on to give a framework which will be implicitly adopted in this article. He argues that security involves some, or all of social, economic, political, military and physical (including ecological and environmental) concerns. Military security involves the interplay between the offensive and defensive capabilities of states and their perception of each others' intentions.
Political security concerns the organisational stability of systems of governments and ideologies that give them legitimacy. Economic security concerns access to resources, finance and markets necessary to sustain acceptable levels of welfare and state values. Social Security concerns sustainability within acceptable limits of the evolution and maintenance of traditional patterns of language, culture, religion and planetary biosphere as the essential support system on which all other common enterprises depend. Various approaches have been used to study national security and to explain the security dilemma in Africa. One of these is realism. Realism has various core assumptions. First is the premise that states are the major, if not primary actors, within the international system.
States maximizing powers
The international system is anarchical and each state can look to no one but itself for defence. Each state thus tries to maximise its powers in relation to other states as potential threats. The defining element of statehood is a territorial base over which the state is sovereign or exercises sovereignty. States in exercising sovereignty do not like other states to interfere in their domestic affairs and thus there is a separation between domestic and foreign policy. Lastly, although security may involve the five elements mentioned above, each of these may deserve long or short term considerations depending on prioritization. In the final analysis, security is all about political-military threats in the short term. This theory is relevant, in certain cases, in explaining the African security dilemma. For instance, in terms of inter-state conflicts, the role of the military in resolving and conditioning some of them can be noted. The recent Ethiopian-Eritrea war fits well within the realist paradigm.
Eritrea as a state had just broken away from Ethiopia in 1991 and thus needed to maintain her newly acquired sovereignty. When the issue of the common border with Ethiopia came up, it felt that Ethiopia was trying to encroach on her territorial boundaries. Closely related to this, was the introduction of her monetary currency nakfa apart from the Ethiopian birr. This assured her of autonomy in policy making. Ethiopia, likewise, fought the war to safe guard her territorial boundaries. Ultimately, the war hinged on military power, the final arbiter in international politics according to realism. The concept of external intervention may seem as not fitting with the realism theory, but when critically analysed, it does. The Cold War influence created a security environment of pervasive penetration by the superpowers, especially in the Third World countries.
Security complicity
In Africa especially, regional security complexes and indigenous conflict patterns within them were structured by global designs and competition of the East-West security communities. This accorded well with realist thinking which argues that, the struggle for power between great powers leads to a struggle for influence among lesser powers in the pursuit of winning them to their sides. Examples such as the conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Namibia and Angola clearly illustrated this notion before the Cold War ended. The demise of the cold war has created a regional power vacuum as the USA; the sole superpower withdraws, in a spirit of isolationism. The end result has been that other regional states have moved in to fill the power vacuum. In spite of the effective utility of realism in explaining some of the security problems in Africa, it falls short of explaining others.
For instance by treating the state as a "black box" and not getting inside, it cannot explain the problems of inadequate political systems or that of economic underdevelopment. Neither can realism theory explain the environmental degradation. For an explanation, one needs to consider other approaches or theory options. The end of the Cold War has once again enhanced the influence of liberal theories of international relations within the academia, a theoretical tradition long thought to have been discredited by perspectives which emphasises the recurrent features of international relations. As an approach to the study of international relations, liberalism has various core assumptions. First, is the assumption that non-state actors play an important role in international relations. Actors like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, World Health Organisation (WHO), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and others all take action in their own way which they deem necessary. The rationale behind the emergence of these actors is the concept of interdependence, fostered through institutional mechanisms. Cooperation and bargaining through these institutions undermines the propensity of states to base their interests simply on military terms.
Secondly, liberalism believes that though the state is the primary actor, it is not a unitary actor and neither the only one on the international scene. The realist perception of the state as a rational actor forgets that there are multiplicities of domestic actors who attempt to arrive at a consensus through bargaining. Lastly, liberalism argues that, the agenda of international politics is extensive and is not restricted to politico-military issues. They advocate for the foregrounding of economic and social issues in foreign policy. This can only be achieved if the world shuns militarism which is often the foreign policy of military rulers and dictators. Thus the liberals advocate for a democratic peace thesis.
In trying to explain the African security dilemma, Liberalism can be used to explain various sources of the dilemma. For example, its character of getting inside the state, unlike realism, has repercussions especially for the security of the states concerned. This is borne out by the fact that, in the post Cold War era, threats to state security are caused by internal rather than external factors. Inadequate political systems, as a security threat in the third world, are premised on four factors. First, these states are multi-ethnic with each group fighting for its own security and supremacy over others (competitors). Second, the regime in power usually lacks support of a significant portion of the population because it represents the interests of a particular group. The result is an absence of perceived popular legitimacy to the existence and security interests of the regime. Thirdly, the state lack effective institutional capacities to provide peace and order for the population.
Lastly, the interplay of the above three factors, leads to a sense of threat to and from the regime in power, rather than extremely motivated threats to the existence of the nation-state. Coupled with the problem of inadequate political systems is the problem of economic underdevelopment. Underdevelopment is in itself not enough to lead to conflict but it is exacerbated by inadequacies of the political systems.
In a situation where the national cake is insufficient, the resulting competition often leads to politics being ethnic as power becomes the only avenue to state resources. Once in power, the elite mismanage and loot available resources before they are removed by others who also try their turn to "eat" by clamoring for political power. Often the elite try to propagate and maintain their hold on power and its economic benefits by resorting to coercive means. The liberals' solutions to the above, is a greater push towards democracy. This push is led by actors in the international system; both state and non-state actors.
The collapse of the Cold War and the resultant push for liberal democracy in Africa, led by the USA being the main proponent and the IMF as well as the World Bank, was as a result of liberal thinking. For instance in Kenya, the suspension of aid by the Paris Club in November 1991 led the monolithically KANU government to liberalise the political system by succumbing to multiparty political system. This averted a political head-on collision between the regime and the forces opposed to it. In 1992 and 1997 there erupted tribal clashes, as a result of the multiparty drive, as the regime in power tried to forestall its eventual removal through elections. Through out the conflict (1992-1997), the international community only condemned and watched. These half way measures, only served to illustrate the shortcoming of the liberal theory, that the state, though some of its sovereignty may have been reduced, still retains some of it, such as monopoly over the instruments of coercion within its territory.
Furthermore, internationalised interventions such as the UN "Operation Restore Hope" in Somalia failed and led to an eventual pull out. And today, Somalia remains embroiled in the throes of a bitter conflict. Another problem with liberal theories is the emphasis on the roles of international regimes, such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Through a process of globalisation, these organisations have advocated for liberalisation of the economy (laissez-faire). However, this has created problems in African countries, especially with the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which have deepened the gap between the rich and the poor. Devaluation, De-subsidisation, de-nationalisation and de-regulation, have led to the internal social-economic inequalities, often a security problem for African elites, who are seen to be more concerned with the West than their own people's welfare.
The situation was best illustrated in 1985 in Sudan when the then President Jaffar Numeiry was ousted by a popular uprising occasioned by his accession to the World Bank demands of de-subsidisation. However, arguing so does not deny liberalism its relevance, especially when it comes to fostering international concern and cooperation on such issues as environmental degradation. Conferences such as the 1992 Rio as well as the 2002 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development, best illustrates the point.
These were occasioned by the realisation of the connections between peoples' needs for development, their dependence on the environment and disregard for it. In fact, this is one area where there is an agreement that liberal theories on cooperation have achieved a lot. In spite of this, events such as the USA pull out from the Kyoto Protocol on climatic change, demonstrates that the nation-state is yet to be consigned to history. The contribution of the World System theory, as propounded by Emmanuel Wallerstein, is that it focuses on economical factors in International Relations. At the core of the theory, is the perception that the process of world capitalist development, determine the dynamics in world politics which are linked to inequalities, an international division of labor, exploitation and relations between the core, periphery and semi-periphery.
Powerful states
The powerful capitalist states prosper due to the exploitation of the weak periphery states. There's a worldwide network of an elite class state, controlling the instrument of state power and using it in the exploitation of their countries. In African countries which are on the periphery, the elites follow the dictates of the elites at the core and direct their state resources towards the core (capitalist).
What this analysis portends for the security of the Third World is the problem of external intervention, inadequate political systems and economic underdevelopment. A critical analysis of world system theory, however is that, it dwells too much on the economic aspect and the issue of class structure. For instance, the IMF and the World Bank are only a perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production worldwide. This has often led to inequalities between the rich and the poor in African states, a sure recipe of security problems in many African states. The World system and capitalism has led to the growth of new threats that do not threaten the entire nation-state but only sections. For instance, the proliferation of small arms in Africa has become a source of concern for most African states.
Terrorism and religious fundamentalism are also a threat as well as international crime. Yet this can never be linked to the society's class structure and their diffuse nature means they are seldom class centered. In the final analysis, all of the three theoretical approaches that have been discussed have weaknesses. There is no single theory that by it self can explain adequately the African security dilemma. But in post Cold War era, one would be tempted to find a thin line between liberalism and world systems theory. This is because both theories contain the elements of globalisation which can best be used to explain the insecurity problem in Africa.
For instance, liberalism with its stress on liberal democracy, free trade, intervention by external actors among others, has in one way freed some states in the continent from autocratic rulers. At the same time, free trade has led to disparities between those living in rural areas as well as the rich and the poor, a fertile ground for conflicts. World systems theory on the other hand with its stress on exploitation, can explain issues like environmental degradation caused by the Multi-National Corporations (MNCs), the rationale behind IMF and World Bank conditionality, as well as issues of economic underdevelopment. It can link Africa's underdevelopment to unfair trade practices on the world market, lack of accessibility to western markets and other internal security threats among others.
