From Cape to Congo : Southern Africa's evolving security challenges

During the apartheid years in South Africa and the Cold War period, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, southern Africa was defined by a realist paradigm of war, destabilization, and mistrust. Toward the latter part of the 1980s, after the end of the Cold War, Namibia's independence in 1990, the defeat of Kenneth Kaunda by the Movement for Multiparty Democracy's Frederick Chiluba in Zambia in October 1991, Mozambique's transition from civil war to multiparty politics in 1992. Bakili Muluzi's defeat of apartheid rule in South Africa, the region appeared to be moving toward a cooperative architecture. Such an architecture held the promise of giving due regard to human security and broader social justice in the region. With trends in regional democratization and the negotiated settlement in South Africa, southern Africa was widely acclaimed as an emerging political, economic, and security role model for Africa, a "pivotal" region that provided a good test case for applying such a paradigm shift. But grand proclamation depicting southern Africa's "miraculous" experience or touting the region as a continental role model have yet to be tested. It is still unclear, for instance, whether the newly democratized South Africa will provide the model for democracy, stability, and promised prosperity for the rest of the continent, a model that the region and Africa as a whole can seek to emulate.