A Handy Frame for Understanding African Peace and Security in the 21st Century

Abstract

Africa is a vast and complex continent that does not lend itself readily to facile characterizations. Yet the need for a handy framework for getting to grips with the state of security and political risk for individual African countries — one that could explain more than the common reductive narrative of war and disease — is ever present. The distortive impact of Africa’s encounter with colonialism and its recreation on the Westphalian state model based on inherited borders is real, and it often looms large in renderings of social, economic and political phenomena. We look beyond this somewhat reductionist lens to propose a frame that identifies five key structural factors that might be seen as essential to a nuanced understanding of the security and political reality in Africa. Granted, a framework that encompasses ethnicity, the state of democracy, rule of law, geopolitics and technology furnishes but one set of lenses. It does no more than provide one set of tools to obtain a summative yet nuanced grasp of what can be a complex and daunting reality. The twin assumptions that under-gird our thinking pertain to the role of the state and the essence of security. We posit that the primary role of the state is to secure life, limb and property — a task that calls for effective resolution of conflicts vertically between the state and subjects of the law and horizontally between the latter. Security encompasses more than regime security, state security and physical security and liberty of individuals — it extends to elements that touch on the social and economic welfare of individuals and societies. Citizen security, or human security, it is often called.