Contested Regionalism: Southern and Central Africa in the Post-Apartheid Era

Abstract

Introduction: Southern Africa and Central Africa The politics that are reshaping the African continent need to be captured from an historical perspective, integrated with an understanding of the contemporary realities which provide the "push" and "pull" factors tugging at the African social fabric. Regional politics clearly are a manifestation of both the old and the new, with a particular salience in Southern and Central Africa. An intriguing aspect of regionalization is that regional blocs are formed often as an attempt to create a political framework for a variety of forms of economic activity. Regionalization has both an external and an internal logic. First, a region in international relations can be a phenomenon imposed from the outside. Regions have formed, for example, in the Cold War context shaped by military or economic alliances. In Africa the external imposition and composition of regions is a phenomenon shaped by the colonial experience, but reinforced during the post colonial period. The notion of a region usually implies some form of territorial contiguity, although regions in Africa have also been delineated along linguistic lines. This arbitrary definition of regions generally has Africa divided into five: East, West, North, South, and Central. Of course the boundaries of these regions do overlap, and it is the troubling and growing spectre of conflict in Central and Southern Africa with which this paper is concerned. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) as a political and economic project will be examined in this context, as well as the evolving notions of security in Southern Africa. The contested boundary between Central and Southern Africa is of particular concern in this paper, focussing on the military intervention of Angola,