Peacebuilding and the New Regionalism in southern Africa

This paper investigates the complexities of establishing sustainable peacebuilding strategies in southern Africa within 'new' security/'new' regionalism contexts. Building peace requires initiatives based upon longer-term developmental, political, economic and social objectives. If peacebuilding is to fulfil its potential for the advancement of 'human' security in Southern Africa, these criteria will best be met through regional solutions. Yet, the new regionalism is multi-dimensional and the various regionalist forces are not necessarily compatible. Although national governments have made some efforts toward the development of a regional security complex, strong statist and realist tendencies persist at official levels and regionalist pressures within civil societies as well as by external actors tend to be mixed and often contradictory. Apart from a widespread recognition in South Africa of the need to give a bottom-up perspective on the question 'who is security all about?', there has been a growing recognition throughout the region as a whole of the desirability of a regional dimension to the security referent.