Globalised images of environmental security in Africa

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, there has been a pronounced concern in academic and policy circles, with global environmental change, and its implications for global security (Speth, 1990; Brock, 1991; Renner, 1996; Brown, 1994; Obi, 1997a, 1997b, 1998b; Leach & Mearns, 1996; Hyden, 1999). At the heart of this shift has been the expansion of the notion of security to include the containment of non‐military, extra‐state threats. Thus, issues such as poverty, environmental degradation, crisis, wars, drug‐trafficking and even migration were included in the emerging perspective to security. Also, globalisation meant that threat‐perception in the west began to take on board the linkages between environmental crisis in the third world, with its strategic needs for stability, markets, resources, and even, leisure. At the same time, there was the concern among some policy‐makers and scholars of the implications of globalisation for the post‐colonial African state, which was experiencing various forms and intensities of crisis. Such fears were based on the belief that a crisis‐ridden Africa would pose a serious threat to global peace and security. This concern is most pronounced in the surviving Cold War superpowers, particularly the United States, which is the undisputed global hegemon in the post‐Cold War order.