The security-development nexus : expressions of sovereignty and securitization in Southern Africa

Source: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet

The link between security and development has been rediscovered after 9/11 by a broad range of scholars. Focussing on southern Africa, The Security-Development Nexus shows that the much-debated linkage is by no means a recent invention. Rather, the security/development linkage has been an important element of the state policies of colonial as well as post-colonial regimes during the Cold War, and it seems to be prospering in new configurations under the present wave of democratic transitions.

Contributors focus on a variety of contexts from South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia, to Zimbabwe and Democratic Congo. They explore the nexus and our understanding of security and development through the prism of peace-keeping interventions, community policing, human rights, gender, land contests, squatters, nation and state-building, social movements, disarmament and reintegration programmes and the different trajectories democratization has taken in different parts of the region.

Contents: Introduction; The security-development nexus / Lars Buur, Steffen Jensen and Finn Stepputat; Internal and external boundaries; You do need a stick to be able to use it gently : The South African Armed Forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Thomas Mandrup Jørgensen; The nationalist imperative : South Africanisation, regional integration and mobile livelihoods / Steffen Jensen and Lars Buur; Namibia's pariah heroes : Swapo ex-combatants between liberation gospel and security interests / Lalli Metsola and Henning Melber; States, development and vernacular security; The intertweined history of security and development : the case of developmental struggles in South Africa's townships / Lars Buur; The politics of policing : re-capturing zones of confusion in rural post-war Mozambique / Helene Maria Kyed; Militarising politics and development : the case of post-independence Namibia / Guy Lamb; Struggling for the city : evictions in inner-city Johannesburg / Jacob Rasmussen; Identity, violence and rights; Through the lens of crime : land claims and contestations of citizenship on the frontier of the South African state / Steffen Jensen; Criminality, security and development : post-colonial reversals in Zimbabwe's margins / Amanda Hammar; Post-apartheid South Africa - gender, rights and the politics of recognition : new avenues for old forms of violence? / Tina Sideris; List of authors; List of references; Index.