Afr.j.polit. sci. (1998), Vol. 3 No. 1, 1-19 
Introduction: Africa - Rethinking 
Security 
Eboe Hutchful* 
Abstract 
Following independence a number of African states were content to seek protection 
under the security umbrella of an external power. The end of the cold war has 
called this clientelism sharply into question, facilitating a variety of challenges to 
the political hegemony of the state and the emergence at the same time of new and 
diffuse forms of force, wielded by private as well as official entrepreneurs of 
violence. Liberalisation and state weakness have encouraged a growing private 
market in security, making possible novel ways of articulating political, commercial, 
and military agendas. The resulting "crisis of security " is forcing both state 
and non-state, domestic and external actors to rethink security concepts and 
architectures, in cooperation as well as competition with each other. 
Introduction 
"Security" has become the big issue in Africa in the 1990s; because during the last 
decade, Africans have been subjected to an extraordinary variety of sources and 
forms of violence: civil wars, ethnic pogroms, religious conflict, political repression, 
forced migrations, and the upheaval associated with structural adjustment. As 
well, the end of the Cold War has brought a remarkable "wave of peace" to some 
of the continent's most durable armed conflicts, but at the same time has sharply 
undermined existing security paradigms and practices, intensifying the "security 
predicament" (Ayoob 1995) of some African states, and giving rise in the process 
to complex new forms and permutations of force, within and beyond the state. In 
response to these developments, African states and civil society, as well as foreign 
donors and powers, are seeking to reconfigure (in collaboration as well as 
competition) security concepts and architectures. One may also note some paradox 
in the way that debates on security in Africa have developed in the process. By the 
1027-0353 © 1998 African Association of Political Science
2 Eboe Hutchful 
end of the 1980s, critics were arguing that "security" needed to extend beyond its 
political and military meaning to encompass other forms of secunt>,, such as he 
satisfaction of basic needs, the right to a sustainable environment, anprotecton 
of cultural and religious identity, and so on. These critics have also sought to of an g^ ^ s o u r c e s ^ v . o i e n c e e m b e d d e d m t h e d o m e s t l c 
but also how the practices of the state itself have constuuted a fundamental source 
of insecurity, not only in the political but also in the social and ideological realms^ 
However the genocidal conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, Algeria, Liberia and Sierra 
Leone have led to the discussion being refocused once again on the most primordial 
meaning of security, as the right to protection from physical abuse and attack. 
Physical safety became the preeminent concern for many Africans as states 
collapsed and were unable to generate fundamental conditions for protection of 
life. Thus both the "primordial" and 'extended' notions of security are being 
problematised in tandem. 
The erosion or collapse of security infrastructures in Africa is linked in turn to 
broader and longer-run problems of governance and development, as well as 
developments at the core of the international system of power and its arms 
economy. However, while "governance and 'development' received considerable 
emphasis from donors in the 1980s, issues of "security"" (like those of the arms 
economy) received very little attention although by the mid-1990s this would 
change as concerns about the stability of African states grew. Depending on how 
it is viewed, "security" is both a dependent and independent variable, a cause as 
well as effect of both governance and development outcomes. The relationship 
between governance and security is both intimate and obvious. First, governance 
is about both creating and assuring conditions of security, and is at the same time 
necessarily underpinned by the management of the instruments of violence. The 
capacity for legitimate use of coercion is a cornerstone of governance. Secondly, 
governance involves the effective administration, regulation and control of the 
instruments of violence. However, we need to speak not only of governance and 
security but also of governance ofor over security: of governance not only as the 
projection of security but also as the effective management of the institutions of 
violence, i.e. the security apparatuses. This is due in part to a paradox of security 
Rulers may discover that the attempt to strengthen internal security also increases 
the power of "strongmen" within their security apparatus, and hence the threat to 
the ruler himself. Extending the monopoly of the state over security is thus liable 
to increase the insecurity of the ruler, as "strongmen" arise within the very organs 
of security. This is the source of what may be termed the "ruler's security 
dilemma". Deliberately weakening the power of the direct controllers of violence 
is an option, attractive in the short-term but potentially fatal in the long-term 
However, this "security dilemma" is not confined to the ruler. Managers of the
Africa: Rethinking Security 3 
security apparatus, as repositories of power, also face their own governance 
challenges: first, in terms of the technical efficiency of the production of force, and 
second, in terms of similar threats of "strongmen" from within the ranks of the 
institution. In many African armies and security forces informal links and structures 
of power, based on such factors as ethnic, family and political connections, 
count much more than formal hierarchy and lines of command. Hence, a key issue 
in the outcome of governance is how holders of political power and managers of 
coercion relate to each other, as well as respond to institutional and political 
challenges from "strongmen" within constituencies under their formal control. 
The relationship between the three variables of governance, security and 
development may be seen in the triple basis of the modern state, namely: (a) social 
and territorial control; (b) monopoly over the legitimate use of force; and (c) 
accumulation of and the drive for revenue. These facets of the foundation of the 
state are driven by different forces and entail dealing with different constituencies, 
and are brought together by the political entrepreneur, ideally in a formula that 
enhances political accountability and responsiveness, security, economic growth 
and state revenues. Such an outcome is not assured, given the fundamental conflict 
between popular sovereignty (political legitimacy), market sovereignty (accumulation), 
and the bureaucratically organised interests of the state itself (power, in 
other words). 
However, security is the crucial historical variable in the rise of the state. 
According to Tilly, states arose as a "security racket", trading protection to 
merchants and others in return for revenues and other services, and in the process 
providing a framework for the organisation of production, exchange and accumulation 
(Tilly 1985). A similar thesis has been advanced by Hymer and others to 
explain the rise of African empires, which were able to extract monopoly rent in 
return for extending military protection to long-distance traders (Hymer 1970, 
Terray 1974). War (as well as other forms of external competition) did for the state 
what competition in the marketplace did for the entrepreneur: it disciplined the 
state, forcing it to hone its capacities and extend its control over internal populations 
and resources, the price of failure being collapse or takeover by a rival state. 
In administering this "racket", the ruler has to respond to several challenges. 
One is what we have already termed the "ruler's security dilemma", namely, those 
who organise the racket are liable to be displaced by those who actually execute 
the racket. Thus the reliability and efficiency of the ruler's security implements are 
in potential conflict with each other. A second problem is: how to fund the racket? 
The avenues have included predation, trading monopolies, taxing and borrowing 
from merchants, seeking protection under the wings of a foreign patron, and 
growing taxation of citizens (getting citizens to pay for their own protection or, as 
is at least as likely to be the case, repression). Tilly refers to taxation to suggest a 
counter-intuitive link between military and coercive power and the development
4 Eboe Hutchful 
of political accountability: warfare creates expanding demand for taxes and 
revenue, which in turn allows the lower strata to demand a voice in decisionmaking. 
Whatever the merits of this argument, we do know that historically, the 
consolidation of the state's coercive power and territorial and social control has 
proceeded in tandem with the activation of civil society and its ability to press 
demands on the state and defend its rights against arbitrary power, together forming 
the contradictory basis to modern statehood and citizenship. 
"Security rackets" also benefited from economies of scale. Herein lay the 
superiority of the modern territorial state as opposed to, say, princely municipalities 
and tribal kingdoms; particularly as the growing sophistication and cost of 
armaments dictated increasing centralisation of the instruments of violence. After 
the Second World War, we see an unprecedented growth in the scale of the security 
racket, both in territorial terms (supra-nationality), and in the technical sophistication 
of production. In other words, the security racket went global, with its own 
hierarchies, centres and peripheries, and patrons and clients. It no longer encompassed 
merely states and their national populations, but also the community of 
states as such, formalised in global alliances. Pushing wares designed to enhance 
the security of states became one of the most lucrative political, diplomatic and 
commercial rackets available. "Security" was articulated to hegemonic objectives 
that made it possible for patrons to subsidise at least part of the cost of reproducing 
the security of the client state. Hence, at the global level, "security" was placed 
beyond the logic of the marketplace, in the specific sense that states did not 
always have to pay the "going price" for their security. "National security" became 
a pre-eminent component of the ideological repertoire of states; at the same time 
the concern for security was no longer seen as coterminous with the boundaries 
of the nation-state, as before, but rather with the existence of a particular 
global order. 
"Security" as Ideology and Power 
"Security" is a racket in another, much more sophisticated sense. Like "order", 
"security" is a highly ideological construct, a normative term which suggests that 
something good, something beneficial, results from the exercise of coercion. The 
ideological force of the discourse is broadened when "security" is linked to other 
normative states, such as 'democracy', or posed as a state of common property 
(such as in the notion of 'national security'), embodied in a supposedly neutral 
professional force. This illusion, of course, quickly falls apart as soon as we 
deconstruct the concept. Who are the protected? What is being protected? Against 
whom? Who defines when a state of security has been achieved, or when a state of 
insecurity is in force? The attempt to respond to these questions has generated 
discourses-gender, classist, ethnicised, radicalised, ideological - fundamental to 
the management of power and order in society. Discourses of security have in turn
Africa: Rethinking Security 5 
furnished the basis for altruistic domination, the power exercised by protectors 
over the protected. In fact, as we well know, "security" has always been dispensed 
very selectively within both the national and international community, reflecting 
socio-economic status, residency, and state of citizenship (who does not remember 
French and Belgian paratroopers airlifting white European nationals from 
Stanleyville in 1964 in the face of the rebel advance, while leaving the natives to 
stew?); in other words, differential perceptions of human worth. The ability to 
project "security", then, as a common good ("equal protection under the law"), is 
one of the crucial achievements of the modern state, requiring in turn the ability to 
engineer perceptions and (to some degree) illusions, of which, surely, the notion 
of "security forces" has to be one of the best contemporary examples. For most 
Africans, however, the reality has been that of force (or worse, violence); Africans 
have too often seen the "force", and hardly ever the "security", in "security forces". 
Popular security has been sought through ethnicity, vigilantism and other primordial 
and non-formal institutions, away from (and often against) the state. 
A subtle form of organised demonology, the ability to create national and global 
"others" who are then held as 'threats to security' is another component of the 
discursive construction of security and of the power to project "security" on a mass 
basis. Such demonisation of particular races, nationalities, ethnic groups, political 
and religious beliefs and movements, even genders has occurred at the level of both 
popular discourse as well as in the technical language of securocrats. Even as the 
Cold War has receded, new forms of demonisation have been invented, with 
scholars and the Pentagon speaking of "civilisational (sic) wars" (Huntington), the 
"Coming Anarchy", and "rogue states". Such demonisation persists not simply 
because of the need for the management of mass psychology, but also because it 
constitutes the ideological carapace for what has undoubtedly emerged, since the 
end of the Second World War, as the most powerful and successful extractive 
machinery in history, the military-intelligence-industrial complex. 
"Back to the Future": The OAU and African State-Making 
If the state is indeed a security racket, then the African state is manifestly a failed 
racket. To some extent this is a global phenomenon: all over the world even within 
the most "secure states" populations are today facing social and criminal violence 
unprecedented in modern times. But the African state is qualitatively different in 
its security predicament. The reasons for this are complex in nature involving 
historical, structural, as well as political and policy factors' - but undoubtedly one 
reason can be located in the moment of creation of the continental system of states 
in the 1960s. At the time of the formation of the OAU in 1963 three fundamental 
issues of statehood confronted Pan-Africanism; the decisions of the nascent 
organisation in responding to these issues would have far-reaching effects on the 
ability of its member-states to develop the attributes of statehood. The first was
6 Eboe Hutchful 
with regard to the issue of governance. One of the least known (but most 
disgraceful) episodes in the founding of the OAU was the rejection by the African 
Heads of State of a clause the only one rejected- in the preamble of the draft Charter 
that would have bound them to ensure "good government" in their respective 
countries, requiring them to affirm that "the aim of government is the well-being 
of the governed" (Mate 1986: 60). 
The second issue was that of (regional) security. At the first OAU summit 
conference in Cairo, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana reportedly 
spoke forcefully of the need for [an] African High Command. He referred 
to the breakdown of law and order in Zaire, which led the Zaire government 
to ask for a UN peacekeeping force, and to the mutiny in the Tanzanian 
army, which led the Tanzanian government to call in British troops, and said 
if there had been an African High Command there would have been no need 
to go outside Africa to seek help. He referred to the armed conflict between 
Ethiopia and Somalia and added that if there had been an African High 
Command, it would have gone in to separate the warring parties or at least 
supervise the cease-fire between them (Ibid.: 172). 
These were prescient words, but they would be rejected repeatedly by the OAU, 
even though the casualties would mount inexorably from the 1960s, in terms of 
both collapsing states and African lives lost. Many African governments preferred 
to seek protection under the military umbrella of a foreign power, or to ally 
themselves with such powers rather than undertake the interventions that Nkrumah 
had considered the legitimate province of Pax Africana. As the 34lh OAU Summit 
opened in Ouagadougou in June 1998 against the background of the recent 
conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the resumption of war between Ethiopia and 
Eritrea, a military revolt to unseat the government of Guinea-Bissau, and so on and 
so forth, African leaders would undoubtedly have reason to revisit Nkrumah's 
prophetic words. 
Thirdly, this rejection of the ideas of Nkrumah was connected with a broader, 
and barely concealed, normative dispute about the nature of 'development'. 
Should development take the form of a socialistic society, as favoured by Nkrumah 
and a minority of African leaders, or capitalism? Since in the African context the 
policy instrumentalities of "socialist" and "capitalist" development were frequently 
indistinguishable, it can be assumed that the real issue behind the rejection 
of Nkrumahs' ideas of continental economics - which would have greatly 
expanded the possibilities of African development - was the extent to which 
'development' should be sensitive to issues of distribution and basic needs. 
Through the decisions wilfully taken at the dawn of African statehood, the OAU 
frustrated any possibility of a clear choice between two competing options: of
Africa: Rethinking Security 7 
genuine regional collaboration (including more localised and self-sufficient forms 
of collective security) on the one hand, and competitive state-building on the other, 
in the first case by sanctioning an organisation so weak as to be unable to coordinate 
or defend the collective interests of member-states, in the second by freezing nonviable 
colonial state boundaries, outlawing intervention by African states in the 
internal affairs of other states, and releasing rulers from the obligation to be 
accountable to their citizens, thus pre-empting the very tensional forces that could 
be expected (at least in the realist paradigm) to shape institutional capacities and 
bonds of legitimacy in African states.2 In reality, of course, underneath the 
pretentious carapace of a new "normative" politics, the realist logic of conflict and 
force operated. New African states interfered extensively, but covertly, in the 
affairs of neighbouring states (providing arms, rear bases and refuge for dissidents, 
funneling third party weapons to insurgents, etc.), and participated in regional 
interventions orchestrated by foreign principals. 
New Post Cold War Configurations of Force 
This farcical (if not cynical) pretence of a moral "Pax Africana" has of course 
collapsed, and arguably a new and more 'realist' Pan-Africanism rooted in a better 
understanding of the historical role of force may be emerging. Ironically, the end 
of the Cold War in concert with other factors, has led in some respects to a renewed 
saliency of force driven however by domestic contradictions rather than greatpower 
manipulation on the one hand and far-reaching reconfiguration of force 
structures and paradigms on the other. First, the winding-down of the Cold War, 
and folding of the imperial military umbrella of the French and the Soviets, have 
led to the collapse of patron-client security arrangements. Second, neo-liberal 
economic restructuring has undermined existing patronage networks generated 
and sustained on the basis of public resources. Third, extensive retrenchment of 
military resources has taken place worldwide, reflecting both the end of the Cold 
War and the global crisis of public finance. At the same time, much of the trade in 
new and surplus weapons (particularly small arms and light weapons) and 
retrenched personnel has been diverted from government to private arms dealers 
and security organisations. From sales of $2-3 billion per annum during the Cold 
War, private arms sales are estimated to have exceeded $25 billion in 1996 
(Bonner 1998).3 
Finally, the activation of civil society and pressures for greater accountability 
and inclusion has forced regimes to reconfigure their arrangements to make them 
more inclusive and accountable, or to even abandon power altogether. The 
resurgence of civil society has prompted (depending on the context) state retreat, 
backlash, and/or power re-composition, leading in some cases to drastic changes 
in the complexion of national political power. Both developments are connected 
to some degree with globalisation and the erosion of certain forms of social control.
8 Eboe Hutchful 
over e.g. communications and the media, on which the state had relied to enforce 
its will against civil society. How the political transition has been managed has had 
decisive consequences for both national political order and regional security: the 
horrific consequences of the failure of democratisation in Burundi and powersharing 
in Rwanda, of the attempt to repress political Islam in Algeria and civil 
society in countries like Togo and the former Zaire, may be contrasted to the 
salutary outcome on the other hand of the transition in South Africa. 
As the hegemony of the state has crumbled, it has precipitated rivalry among 
warlords, visionaries, adventurers, ethno-nationalists, and big power interests in 
manipulating the vacuum, appropriating and shaping new force structures as well 
as the nature of the developing geopolitical space. Combined with weapons 
proliferation from winding-down wars, the decomposition of the state has prompted 
vicious new forms of conflict, depicted by the media and scholars, a descent into 
barbarism and anarchy, "orgies of primordial savagery",4 and a "retreat from 
modernity" (Mazrui 1995). However, the resulting geopolitical conflicts and 
alignments are not necessarily 'new' but represent a sometimes intricate fusion of 
old and new cleavages, struggles and alliances, bringing together veterans from the 
Katangese and successive Zairian rebellions, and the protracted Angolan war, as 
well as victims and perpetrators of past and current Rwanda and Burundi "ethnic 
pogroms". 
However, these same dynamics have encouraged several positive developments. 
One of these is the new geopolitical alliances, Africa-centred rather than 
shaped by foreign powers, with a corresponding potential for emergence of 
regional hegemonic powers (South Africa, Nigeria). The second is a new regionalism, 
demonstrated at several levels: a revived interest in regional approaches to 
issues of trade and economic cooperation (the emergence of more formal and 
elaborate SADC structures, the expansion of IGAD. and most remarkably the 
revival of a new version of the East African Community); and a much more serious 
interest in mechanisms of regional security. This regional approach to security is 
underpinned by a new interventionist ethos, best expressed by Mandela at the 34th 
OAU summit in Ouagadougou. According to Mandela, Africa has a right and a 
duty to intervene to root out tyranny, notwithstanding the OAUs founding principle 
of non-intervention in the internal affairs of member states: "we [African leaders] 
must all accept that we cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to deny 
the rest of the continent the right and duty to intervene when, behind those 
sovereign boundaries, people are being slaughtered to protect tyranny".5 
The "Mandela Doctrine" is already manifested in the new willingness with 
which African countries are prepared, contrary to the historical and ideological 
legacy of the OAU, to intervene across national borders to restore order, to resist 
insurrections, and even to overthrow tyrants, as in the case of the SADC in Lesotho 
(1994); ECOWAS/ECOMOG in Liberia and Sierra Leone, East Africa in Burundi;
Africa: Rethinking Security 9 
Uganda, Rwanda and Angola in former Zaire; Angola in the Congo, and, most 
recently, the armies of Guinea and Senegal in Guinea-Bissau. As this record 
suggests, however, this security-oriented regionalism, is occurring within a variety 
of formats -collective, bilateral and unilateral, formal and informal, regional and 
sub-regional6 - that suggest that it has yet to develop the requisite consensus as to 
framework. 
However, one wants to note in particular the emergence of three types of 
entrepreneur of violence to whom this decomposition of the old state and regional 
order has given rise: 
(a) The "new breed" of statesman - the so-called "African Mett'ernichs" 
(Museveni, Kagame, Zehawi, Afewerki, etc.). who are reshaping the regional 
geopolitical system while at the same time transforming national 
politics, economies, and security structures. These are men schooled in the 
diplomacy and realpolitik of violence, having fought in or come to power 
through protracted war (and in several cases facing internal insurgencies of 
their own). 
(b) The warlord, a new type of African political entrepreneur who links violence, 
territorial acquisition and business, opportunistically dismembering or reconstituting 
states. Unlike the citizen-soldier who took to the battlefield and 
harnessed violence in pursuit of political liberation and social transformation, 
the warlord is characterised by the almost complete absence of a 
political programme; the deliberate and systematic use of terror and "ethnic 
cleansing" (perpetrated mostly against the civilian population) as a weapon; 
the use of children and youth (often abducted and drugged) as shock-troops 
and cannon-fodder, and the utilisation of violence to colonise natural 
resources the exploitation of which in turn drives the war machine. However, 
in part because of the absence of an ideological bond, the warlord type faces 
the familiar problem of strongmen within the ranks, leading to the proliferation 
of warlord factions. 
(c) The privatisation and commercialisation of security and the emergence of the 
defence corporation and security entrepreneur. Unlike the warlord, the latter 
is an ex-military professional, often with links to Cold War or (in the case of 
Executive Outcomes) apartheid structures, no (admitted) territorial ambitions, 
loyalties or political interests, claiming to work exclusively in the 
employ of sovereign entities to fill the security vacuum emerging at the end 
of the Cold War. The defence corporations for which they work (such as 
Executive Outcomes, Sandline, Defence Systems Ltd, and MPRI) are 
diversified, international concerns combining war and business and offering 
a range of services and interlocking ownership and directorates. In these 
corporations, the New Realism about business meets the New Realism about 
force.
10 EboeHutchful 
Important changes on both the supply and demand sides of the security market 
lie behind the emergence of the defence corporation. First, the increasing inability 
of the state to extend protection has rendered "security" a scarce resource, available 
no longer to everyone by right of belonging in a political community, but at a price 
to those who can purchase it. In other words, security has become a tradable 
commodity, and has shifted from being a political relation (an entitlement of 
citizenship) to a market relationship - usually tied directly to protection and 
exploitation of minerals and other productive assets. 
This is not entirely fortuitous, but is tied in several ways to a second factor, the 
logic of liberalisation and "neo-liberal" efficiency. The present mode of production 
of security is one of the most inefficient sectors, characterised by the existence 
of a large "security" rent in the form of high (and unjustified) military expenditures 
and perquisites. Official forms of force have simply failed to compete with those 
being provided by the "private" sector (see Howe and Urell's analysis of the success 
of Executive Outcomes relative to the official armies in ECOMOG); African 
armies have proven to be fragile constructs, difficult to control politically, and 
unreliable on the field of battle. The state, in this area also, withdraws from functions 
that it cannot provide efficiently. The emergence of the "military or defence" 
corporation, converting Cold War assets to new uses in the market place, is the most 
extreme (if logical) expression of this privatisation of state and social functions. 
Thirdly and more broadly, this process is the result of a conjunction of 
globalisation, liberalisation and weak states. The security corporation represents 
an essential (if perhaps temporary) component in the organisation of business in 
weakened states undergoing rapid liberalisation and globalisation (Reno 1997). 
Aggressively globalising businesses trying to exploit opportunities from 
liberalisation confront the dilemma of weak states with attractive resources and 
unviable security situations. This is a situation ready-made for the new kind of 
"security" specialist organised as a private business concern and ready to 
'barter'security for "shares" in a natural resource enterprise. These firms combine 
war and business (in much the same way as "legitimate" states had combined 
politics and business). It is thus in the interstices between collapsing states and 
globalisation that the new forms of force are insinuating themselves, represented 
at its most sophisticated by the security corporation, but also encompassing 
Russian criminal gangs, Colombian, Nigerian and Mexican drug lords, arms 
trafficking by soldiers including generals, and so on. It is a reminder of the extent 
to which, in the emerging world order, control over violence is a key to controlling 
both legitimate trade (such as in mineral resources) and lucrative but illicit 
transactions. 
For the foreign investor as much as for the African state, the for-hire security 
arrangement has distinct advantages in that it side-steps problems of control and 
effectiveness, in this sense helping to minimise the "ruler's security dilemma". It
Africa: Rethinking Security 11 
broadens the range of options available to African rulers in difficulty, allowing 
them to subordinate local strongmen and to reconfigure political networks and 
relationships (Reno 1997). On the other hand, it is liable to create potential new 
problems (such as the danger of backlash from traditional institutional providers 
of such services, as we saw in the case of Sierra Leone), and to lead to further 
displacement of sovereign functions. The specialised provision of security services 
targeted at paying clients also accentuates the problem of accountability in 
relation to force, further marginalising the bulk of the population as respects their 
ability to control and benefit from the organisation of force. 
The notion of "privatisation of force" orwhat Cock calls "private miniaturisation" 
(Cock 1996) actually covers a range of different phenomena generated by the 
breakdown of the states claim to the legitimate monopoly of violence. The new 
force structures have been bent to a variety of purposes and agendas, depending on 
the context: tapped into respectively by states to underpin a situation which they 
are no longer militarily capable of defending, by privileged social interests to 
substitute for the protection that the state is no longer capable of providing, by 
criminal gangs as well as popular forces seeking to protect themselves (via 
vigilantism) from them, and finally by a variety of warlords and adventurers to 
challenge the state. Hence, whether they enhance or detract from "security" 
depends on who is doing the reckoning. We have to stress therefore the complex 
manifestations and political colourations of private miniaturisation, as well the 
equally complex articulations between unofficial and official forms of force 
emerging in Africa. Examples of this abound: the relationship between the former 
Rwandan regime and the interahamwe, between the "third force" and the South 
African security forces, and between the Sierra Leone government and the 
kamajors; or, at a different level, the alliances between Taylor and certain West 
African states, between ECOMOG and certain Liberian and Sierra Leonean 
warlords, between UN forces and anti-Aideed warlords in Somalia. Political forces 
that have lost democratic contests in the public sphere, such as Nguesso in Congo- 
Brazzaville7 and the pro-apartheid right wing, have resorted to private miniaturisation 
to offset their loss and even recapture power. 
Rethinking Security: Reforming Paradigms and Structures 
The decomposition of security arrangements of African states and the struggles to 
democratise the public space have intertwined to produce some sharp questioning 
of security concepts and architectures, as well as their underlying relations of 
power, on the part of both citizens, and (less radically) states. African leaders have 
failed not only to 1 ink the security of their regimes with the security of their citizens, 
but also to guarantee the security of even their regimes. The result is that both states 
and non-state actors are being forced to rethink the meaning and implements of 
security.
12 EboeHutchful 
On their part, African states have sought to bolster their security arrangements 
in three principal ways. One, as we have seen, is by "contracting-out" security 
functions (e.g. to mercenaries), while continuing to rely on military aid and cotraining 
networks. A second approach has been to revamp security architectures at 
several levels. 
(a) Restructuring in the area of both governance and operational structures 
The advent of democracy has necessitated some effort (with what success it 
is difficult to say at this stage) to redesign civil-military relations, both to 
facilitate political control, and to reconcile the armed forces and civil society 
(the most remarkable example of this rapprochement between the two sides 
is the one that has taken place in Mali since 1991). 
(b) Downsizing of budgets and force numbers 
Security forces and structures are being redesigned to more closely reflect 
fiscal imperatives and social utility, as well as to align them with (neo-liberal) 
market concepts. In economic terms, there have traditionally been two 
problems with the way security, as a commodity, has been organised: first, 
security was considered an intangible, "public good" not amenable to 
conventional cost-benefit analysis; and second, it was a (state) monopoly, 
hence attracted a monopoly rent, and with that considerable in-built waste. 
Armed forces are no longer considered immune to structural adjustment. 
Camdessus, the Managing Director of the IMF has decreed that military 
expenditure in excess of 4.5% percent of the national budget is economically 
unjustifiable, and at least one donor has funded a study to align defence 
spending in developing countries with security needs and reduce the element 
of rent in security outlays (see MacDonald 1997). However, while overall 
military expenditure in Africa has in any case gone down significantly since 
the mid-1980s, there are also notable variations in performance (Ejigu and 
Gedamu 1996). For instance, in the southern cone, South Africa8 has 
reduced its military budget by at least 51 per cent since 1989, with force 
numbers expected to fall from 121,000 to 75,000. Zimbabwe is also reducing 
its forces from 51,000 to 40,000 troops, while Mozambique's present 
manpower of 12,000 is actually less than half of the 30,000 authorised by the 
1992 peace agreement. Botswana, with huge foreign reserves, is the only 
exception to this trend, with significant new weapons acquisitions and 
corresponding increases in military spending (Honwana 1996: 38). 
(c) Changing Mission and Role Definitions 
Armed forces' roles are being redefined to give much greater emphasis to 
what used to be considered "collateral" functions, such as tasks of national
Africa: Rethinking Security 13 
development and peacekeeping roles. At a recent conference in Ethiopia in 
May 1998, representatives of African militaries were anxious to stress their 
contributions to national development; the Ghana Armed Forces was into 
farming and domestic air services, the Senegalese army was delivering 
health and education services, and so on. This mission reorientation, as well 
as general review of force structures, has probably been taken furthest in the 
case of the South African National Defence Force (See the contribution by 
Williams to this volume, and also Williams 1996: 73). The idea of involvement 
of the armed forces in civic and development tasks is not new, of course; 
but it has re-emerged primarily due to fiscal and political exigencies, rather 
than, as in the 1960s, as a result of the misguided notion that armed forces are 
somehow uniquely equipped to execute development functions.9 
A third approach is an increasing shift in the direction of regional security and 
"Pax Africana", an autonomous African capacity to deal with regional conflict 
issues, based on a clearer recognition of the link between domestic and regional 
stability, and possibly, the emergence of somewhat more flexible attitudes on the 
question of national sovereignty. However, the record of collaboration between 
African states on issues of regional security has been a sorry one, a remarkable 
record of myopia and missed opportunities replicating that of the OAU at the 
continental level. This is particularly clear in the case of ECOMOG. While 
ECOMOG has been hailed as the most advanced case of regional collaboration on 
issues of security (and indeed the settlements in Liberia and Sierra Leone are 
historic), in reality ECOMOG was a classic case of blundering into peacekeeping. 
A Mutual Defence treaty signed in 1981 and adopted in 1986 by eleven of the 16 
member states, with provision for an intervention mechanism, should arguably10 
have prepared the ECOWAS states for the very challenges encountered in Liberia 
and Sierra Leone. However, for unexplained reasons, this treaty was never 
implemented. In many respects - the dominance of a single regional power, the 
often deep polarisation within ECOWAS itself regarding the operation," the lack 
of inter-operability among the component national forces, and the minimum 
control exercised by the political directorate over the military body, among others- 
ECOMOG was a classic example of how not to conduct peacekeeping. 
The ECOMOG operation was replete with ironies (as may perhaps be expected 
when weak states attempt to restore order among still weaker neighbours); the 
ECOWAS members themselves were involved in difficult political transitions, the 
structural and political crises that sustained these rebellions - economic stress, 
state decay and delegimation, dislocation of youth - were present among other 
states in the region; and, from the point of view of political legitimacy and 
behaviour on the battlefield there was little to choose between the warlords on the 
one hand, and the official heads of state and their armies on the other. ECOMOG
14 EboeHutchful 
also teaches the important lesson that one should not conflate regional security and 
human security as suggested by the fact that the government of General Abacha, 
which took the lead in regional peace-enforcement, would at the same time be 
ostracised by the international community for its abuse of human rights at home. 
As a concept, regional security seeks to collectivise the costs of reproducing the 
security of each individual state; it remains in this sense state-centric, and thus 
hardly constitutes a complete paradigm shift. The settlements that brought "peace" 
to Liberia and Sierra Leone did not seek as forcefully to address the domestic issues 
at the root of regional conflagration, technically due to sensitivity on the issue of 
national sovereignty, but in reality due to the fact that hardly any West African 
leader was in a position to strike moralistic poses on issues of governance and 
human rights. States in the region have still to realise that the best guarantee of state 
security is the security of their citizens, and the willing acceptance by those citizens 
of the political rules of the game on which the state's own legitimacy rests. 
At least in terms of political will, the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and 
Security seems to be ahead of ECOWAS in attempting to integrate issues of 
politics, security and development into a coherent framework, seeking among 
other objectives to promote "common political value systems and institutions". A 
closer look suggests, however, that the organ has "major deficiencies in the critical 
areas of doctrine, inter-operability, training, communications, and equipment" 
(Rupiya 1996: 45). In addition to the scarcity of human and financial resources, 
other reasons seem to be a reluctance to surrender national sovereignty and fear of 
South African hegemony, particularly given the perceived domination of South 
Africa National Defence Force (SANDF) by former apartheid elements, and 
attempts by certain Western powers to nudge South Africa into playing a sublmpenal 
role in the region (Honwana 1996: 35-6). 
Further, as we have seen, there is also less than complete consensus on the 
framework for organising Regional Security. The OAU has established a central 
organ for conflict prevention, management and resolution that will facilitate the 
deployment of peacekeeping forces in collaboration with the UN However at the 
Ca.ro summit in 1993, where this decision was taken the OAU decided against an 
African regional peacekeeping force. Foreign powers are moving to fill the 
resulting vacuum. There are several such initiatives in the works (including 
proposals from France and the UK), but the best-known example is the American 
African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI). The OAU and many African countries 
m . f ? t U l ^ l 3 C k o f coordination between these initiatives, and (in relation 
e.A? ^e .sleeve and potentially divisive approach taken by the US in 
electing certain Afncan states for participation in ACRI while excluding others, 
thus creating the appearance of a system of alliance with the US rather than a 
regional secunty system intended to benefit all African states. There are also 
concerns relat.ng to the limited resources available under the initiative (which
Africa: Rethinking Security 15 
focuses on training rather than the equipment and logistics requested by African 
armed forces), as well as philosophical differences over the approach to peacekeeping, 
in particular regarding the "robust" approach preferred by the Americans.
12 
This great power's concern with issues of regional security in Africa is not 
altogether salutary, however, since it also mirrors a shift once again in the donor 
discourse from "governance" (emphasising democracy) back to political stability 
and "development". This is particularly clear in the case of the US, where Clinton's 
decision to meet African leaders in Uganda was designed to send adeliberate signal 
of support for a "new generation of leaders" in the region, epitomised by Museveni, 
"who care less about establishing full-fledged democracies than they do about 
developing their countries"." And with this there has been more readiness to 
tolerate less conventional means of assuring security, the clearest demonstration 
of this being the willingness of international capital to deal with warlord regimes 
or to create security enclaves designed to facilitate exploitation of mineral 
resources. 
States are not the only entities revamping their concepts and structures of 
security. A similar, but much more expansive, process of reconceptualisation is 
being carried on by activists in civil society as well as by certain international 
organisations. Since concepts and practices of "security" have historically been 
"partisan", it is not surprising that political change (and democratic change in 
particular) should provoke some questioning of reigning security concepts. These 
alternative concepts have tried to deepen the meaning of security, from the 
militaristic and, state-centric concepts implied in "national" or "internal security" 
to emphasise in addition certain broad entitlements such as access to basic needs 
and services (education, health, shelter), the right to a clean and sustainable 
environment, and protection for cultural identity and autonomy. Security is seen 
as an outcome (as well as a cause) of both development and good governance and 
incorporates an element of distributive justice. These concepts - "Common 
Security", "Human Security", or "Extended Security" are rooted in the developmentalist 
discourse rather than the power or dominance discourse that characterises 
security in international relations theory, and are more inclined to see the human 
person, rather than the state, as the beneficiary of security. The state, too, is no 
longer seen as exercising exclusive responsibility for assuring security or managing 
conflict. NGOs, with their proximity to the people, are increasingly seen as 
essential aspect of an early warning system, particularly with regard to ethnic 
conflict, and useful as well for monitoring human rights abuses and the conduct of 
security forces. 
While such a deepening of the concept of security is salutary, these concepts 
seem often to lack the necessary conception of agency and political strategy. To 
challenge ruling concepts of security is to potentially challenge, or undermine, the
16 EboeHutchful 
self-justification of the state, as well as underlying relations of power and 
distribution. After all, "security" is the most ideologically charged and hegemonic 
concepts of the twentieth century. These alternative concepts of security need to 
be complemented by a strategy for engaging and displacing traditional, statecentred 
security concepts and their material apparatuses and transforming the 
power relations that underpin them. This element of a political strategy seems to 
be missing, in relation not only to restructuring security mechanisms, but also to 
the global economic order to produce the distributive justice advocated. In 
addition, as Campbell suggests in his contribution on Angola, it is necessary to 
question not only security paradigms, but the very vocabulary and narratives that 
inform and shape the paradigms, such as masculinist and ethnicist interpretations 
of African culture and history that underpin the approaches to "conflict management" 
in Africa, and the absurdity of the world's arms producers posturing as 
"peacekeepers" in Africa. Finally, NGOs should not necessarily be confused with 
the broad democratic forces of the people, whose intervention in the security debate 
(in so far as they have been allowed voice) has received little recognition. The role 
of the community in peace-making and reconciliation in Mali, in relation both to 
the Tuareg rebels and to the armed forces, has been dramatically highlighted in 
Mali (Poulton and Youssouf 1998); while Campbell points to the role of women 
in the peace movement in Angola and Lundin to the role of the community in the 
process of psychological healing and reintegration of demobilised soldiers that 
followed the war in Mozambique. It is such popular forces whose voices (as 
distinguished from those of professional peacemakers) remain to be heard in the 
debate on security in Africa. 
Notes 
* Professor, Department of African Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit, 
Michigan, USA. 
1. See the excellent and comprehensive analysis by Ayoob (1995). Ayoob argues 
that unlike security threats to the older (European) states, the principal security 
threats to Third World states are internal (the result of poorly integrated multiethnic 
societies, irrational borders, weak and unarticulated economies, and 
external dependency), though shaped by broader historical and structural 
factors that are both internal and domestic in origin. Third World state 
formation occurs within a radically different historical and international 
context than had confronted earlier states: and an environment dominated by 
mature (and stronger) states, with the further challenge of developing the 
attributes of statehood in a much more compressed time frame than older states 
had been required to do. 
2. The realist paradigm might conceivably argue that in defining their security in 
terms of relationships with external power centres, African sates broke the
Africa: Rethinking Security 17 
organic link between war-making and state-making: between security, 
accountability to citizens an accumulation processes. 
3. Bonner, Raymond 1998. "For U.S. Gun Sales are Good Business". New York 
Times, 6 June 1998. 
4. Barbara Crossette in the New York Times, 14 June 1998. 
5. Cape Times, 10 June 1998, p. 4. 
6. None of these classifications is watertight. In the case of ECOWAS intervention 
in theory took a collective form, but in fact there were strong elements of 
the unilateral (on the side of Nigeria). In the case of Central Africa the 
intervention into the former Zaire did not assume such a formal structure (and 
thus could technically be considered "unilateral"); nevertheless there was 
strong collaboration between the governments of Uganda, Rwanda and Angola 
in the exercise. The subsequent intervention into Congo-Brazzaville demonstrated 
further differences in modality. 
7. See the contribution by Bazenguissa-Ganga. 
8. The review of the South African defence forces appears unusually ambitious 
and wide-ranging, involving at the same time such issues as revisions in 
defence posture, force design, and mission doctrine, and the organisation of the 
Ministry and Department of Defence, and overhaul of the racial structure 
(representativeness) of SANDF. See the fascinating contribution by Rocky 
Williams in this issue. Also White Paper on Defence approved by the South 
African Parliament, 14May 1996, and Defence Review Work Group, Defence 
Review, Department of Defence, Pretoria, April 1998. Another unusual feature 
of the review process is the strong and authoritative role being played by the 
new Parliament. 
9. This trend has also generated some debate as to whether involvement in 
internal, nonmilitary functions does not undermine the professionalism 
and political subordination of armed forces. See Desch 1996 and Goodman 
1996. 
10. "Arguably" because the applicability of the provision of the treaty to the 
specific case of Liberia (and later Sierra Leone) was to become one of the key 
issues of contention within ECOWAS itself. See Vogt 1993; 1996, and Bundu 
Abass in "West Africa", 30 June-6 July p. 1040-1. 
11. Several members of ECOWAS questioned the legitimacy of ECOMOG's 
mandate; both ECOMOG itself and the factions it was battling enjoyed support 
among rival factions within ECOWAS. See the excellent accounts by Vogt, 
1992; 1996. 
12. Another initiative being considered by the Americans is an African Centre for 
Security Studies to be run by the Pentagon and to replace similar centres located 
in Germany, Washington and Hawaii and covering the European, Latin 
American and Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions.
18 EboeHutchful 
13. James C McKinley Jr., "A New Model for Africa: Good Leaders Above AH" 
New York Times, 25 March, 1998. 
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