Military and security education for regional co-operation: a case study of the Southern African Defence and Security Management Network

This article first summarises approaches to military and security education at tertiary levels for officers and senior security officials, identifying some institutional and conceptual issues, before moving on to a fairly detailed case study of the Southern African Defence and Security Management Network (SADSEM). In its institutional form, from 2000 to 2010, SADSEM was a unique experiment in building a regional network of universities providing training and education in security studies, promoting regional security co-operation and integration and working closely with security forces and governments in the Southern African region. Although it mostly worked in English, it also carried out education and research in French and Portuguese, established an institutional base in ten Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations and delivered programmes in all the then 15 of them. Its activities included providing training and education for defence and security management, civil-military relations, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, policy support and the building of scholarly capacity though regional co-operation. Today SADSEM activities are restricted mainly to an annual security review conference, but its real legacy is in the institutions and capacities it built within several Southern African countries, although not all survive. SADSEM kept a low profile because of extreme sensitivities in Southern Africa around security issues, and this is the first attempt to examine its experience in the context of higher-level security education and training

THE SOUTH AFRICAN ‘WAR RESISTANCE’ MOVEMENT 1974–1994

From the mid-1970s until the onset of negotiations to end apartheid in 1990, escalating military conflict in the Southern African region was accompanied by a steady increase of conscription dependent on the white male population in South Africa. This was compounded by a process of militarisation in the white community, under the apartheid regime’s ‘total national security strategy’.[i]In turn, this provoked a counter-reaction in the form a movement of resistance to conscription and more generally to the various internal and external conflicts. Resistance was initially led by exiled self-styled ‘war resisters’ who set up a number of support organisations. After some political contestation, one such organisation, the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR) emerged as the leading force and aligned itself openly with the African National Congress (ANC). This paper is the first academic contribution to focus on COSAWR and touches on its legacy in terms of its influence on the ANC and the policy frameworks it helped establish for post-apartheid security policy

Modern supratidal microbialites fed by groundwater: functional drivers, value and trajectories

Microbial mats were the dominant habitat type in shallow marine environments between the Palaeoarchean and Phanerozoic. Many of these (termed ‘microbialites’) calcified as they grew but such lithified mats are rare along modern coasts for reasons such as unsuitable water chemistry, destructive metazoan influences and competition with other reef-builders such as corals or macroalgae. Nonetheless, extant microbialites occur in unique coastal ecosystems such as the Exuma Cays, Bahamas or Lake Clifton and Hamelin Pool, Australia, where limitations such as calcium carbonate availability or destructive bioturbation are diminished. Along the coast of South Africa, extensive distributions of living microbialites (including layered stromatolites) have been discovered and described since the early 2000s. Unlike the Bahamian and Australian ecosystems, the South African microbialites form exclusively in the supratidal coastal zone at the convergence of emergent groundwater seepage. Similar systems were documented subsequently in southwestern Australia, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides, as recently as 2018, revealing that supratidal microbialites have a global distribution. This review uses the best-studied formations to contextualise formative drivers and processes of these supratidal ecosystems and highlight their geological, ecological and societal relevance

Governing Insecurity

xii, 340 hlm.; 23 c

Mauritius: An Exemplar of Democracy, Development and Peace for the Southern African Development Community?

Mauritius proves a principle increasingly being asserted by the AU and SADC, especially through Nepad: that is, that democratic governance should underpin development. Africa Insight Vol.35(1) 2005: 14-1

Nuclear weapons: Implications for Africa

The prevention of nuclear proliferation has become a high priority for the international community. The paper analyses the rationale for - and against - this high priority, viewing it as a means to the end of preventing nuclear war rather than as an end in itself. It then proceeds to analyse the proliferation risks in Africa, finding them to be quite insignificant. The former (unofficial) nuclear weapons state South Africa has destroyed its nuclear weapons and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Libya has apparently abandoned its former nuclear ambitions, whereas other potential nuclear proliferants such as Egypt were never very serious in their quest for nuclear weapons. Africa is thus mainly of interest in a non-proliferation context by virtue of its uranian deposits. While the most important producers are today under satisfactory control, it is conceivable--but not very likely--that uranium mining will become economically feasible in other countries in the future, depending mainly on the price of uranium ore. Due to the generally low technological level and the almost complete absence of processing facilities, it is deemed highly unlikely that any new nuclear powers will emerge in Africa