Tag: Regional Security Complex Theory

The Great Lakes Region (GLR) appears to be an arena of intractable conflicts that have continued to evade durable solutions or have resisted mitigating interventions. To this end, the GLR poses challenges to AfSol’s commitment to building sustainable peace on the continent. This paper applies the Regional Security Complex Theory to establish a pattern of security interdependence in order to discern lessons for the AfSol approach. This will be done using a minimalist definition of the GLR that focuses on four states: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Findings show that the current state of security distress is a result of various structural and proximate factors such as colonial impact, political culture, ethnicity and weak state systems that take advantage of geographical proximity to cause the spread of conflicts and insecurity through conditions of clustering, contagion/diffusion and connectedness. The multiplicity of actors in the four states and the various rebel movements in each define the dynamics of security, giving rise to a regional insecurity complex more so than a security complex. The existence of AfSol, however, continues to offer some modicum of hope if lessons are to be learnt from the experience of the four countries. The lessons are that i) common factors take advantage of geographical proximity to socialise the GLR states into a region of insecurity; ii) the GLR is a conflict formation security complex; iii) ethnicity is instrumentalized by political elites; iv) the rebel problem is linked to state actors; and v) the old agenda for security dominates the GLR security complex.