Defence Diplomacy Activities Engendering States’ Cooperation: Addressing Contemporary Global Security Threats in Africa

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners in foreign policy deemed defence diplomacy (DD) as a contradiction or ambiguous because institutions claiming to apply it were in the realm of bearing arms for coercion. In the post-Cold War era, DD emerged as leading concept in importance as an instrument of States’ foreign defence and security policies. Globalization imperatives and the pragmatic view of State security through human security perspectives, brought in knowledge on evolution of inter-State’s security challenges. Moreover, States engagement in multilateral diplomacy were on the rise to address emerging cross-border security threats. The roles of defence and security institutions were evolved with emerging security threats particularly in the realm of human security. The paper examines DD activities engendering states’ cooperation, with a view to addressing contemporary global security threats in Africa. It adopted mixed research design employing purposive sampling techniques and strategist paradigm for primary data analyses. It revealed three key DD activities engendering cooperation in African states including: foreign defence and security policy outreach, defence and security cooperation in education and training, and defence and security partnerships cooperation. It concludes that application of DD activities engenders African states cooperation in promotion of peace and security. Finally, the paper recommends that, the African States’ policymakers, particularly in sub-regional security mechanism, should leverage defence diplomacy to promote cooperation between their defence and security institutions.