Regional Security Governance in Africa

This issue of African Security takes readers across the African continent – Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudano-Sahelian region. The four articles in the issue focus on topics that are contemporaneous, diverse, and multifaceted. Yet, they all have something in common: viz., a concern with regional security governance (RSG) on the continent of Africa. The reader will be able to decipher conceptual and practical elements related to security governance in each of these articles. They speak to a larger concern with the broadening of the security concept since the end of the Cold War and the consequent proliferation of regional security institutions across the globe. Globally, the RSG concept has maintained a traditional concern with a militaristic approach to security, but it also gradually evolved in recognition of the widening and deepening of the conceptualization of security. On the African continent, RSG has also responded to the changing conceptualization of security. New security issues and mechanisms have emerged as a result of this evolution. The challenge though is to articulate the uniquely African response to grappling with the realities of a changing security environment from local, sub-national, national, and regional perspectives. The four articles in this issue of African Security attempt to do just that. In “Revisiting Regional Security Complex Theory in Africa: Museveni’s Uganda and Regional Security in East Africa,” Barney Walsh engages with the Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) and its analytical utility in Africa. Walsh grapples with the capacity of RSCT to explicate the agency of African states, security challenges, inter-state relations and influence on regional security dynamics. The role of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, in East Africa provides Walsh’s empirical case. The article unpacks the intricate transactional leadership of Yoweri Museveni – the balancing of competing interests among various levels of internal and external institutional and noninstitutional actors and the consequent outsized influence of Uganda in East Africa. It reveals from an individual level of analysis how a regional security complex was constructed in East Africa. In many respects, Walsh builds on the regional security complex theory of Buzan and Weaver but modifies it by showing how an African leader actually asserted his individual influence to shape a regional security complex on the African continent. Christopher Williams and Mihaela Papa explore how South Africa views international alliances in “Rethinking ‘Alliances’: The Case of South Africa as a Rising Power.” Williams and Papa find that South Africa conceptualizes AFRICAN SECURITY 2020, VOL. 13, NO. 4, 297–299 https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2020.1871996