Africa in the global security dilemma

Special Matarirano
In Malaysia, an airliner disappeared into thin air between departure point and expected destination and the Malaysian government has appealed to the global community for help.
On the night of April 14, Nigeria’s Islamist group Boko Haram, which had been on a long run of terror attacks, kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from a boarding school in the remote north-eastern town of Chibok.

They torched the school and Nigeria has allowed foreign assistance in hunting down the perpetrators.
On Tuesday May 20, a day after the Nigeria military announced it knew where the Abicho girls were, in Djibouti, Al Shabaab clawed its way back into the headlines, claiming responsibility for a weekend bomb attack on a restaurant packed with Westerners.

This follows the attack on the Westgate Mall on September 21, 2013 in Kenya, for which Al Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group, claimed responsibility for killing 67 people and wounding 175.

Many people wonder and question what has gone wrong with the way and character of international peace.
The world seems to have gone rogue in its approach to international peace and security. The abduction of the school children by Boko Haram touched an international nerve, and led to the kind of global condemnation few African outrages have attracted in recent years.

A new type of security mechanism has emerged. There have been weekly rallies held in Nigeria, and western capitals, demanding the release of the girls.
A Twitter hashtag “BringBackOurGirls” has gone viral as celebrities and US First Lady Michelle Obama, joined the campaign.

Is international security undergoing a particularly radical transformation?
Is this a sign of a New Security Dilemma (NSD)? It can be discerned from these developments that the Traditional Security Dilemma is being subsumed in a wider and more complex NSD, in which the roles of a more pluralistic universe of social, economic, and political forces are challenging the capacity of states to provide security.

While attempts by states to provide international security through traditional state-based military modes and mechanisms are proving increasingly counterproductive in today’s environment of complex economic, political and military interdependence, multiculturalism, and asymmetric power relations, it is pertinent to situate the concept of a new security dilemma in the wider framework of Structural Realism — the school of thought from which the term originated, and which has generated the most voluminous literature.

According to realists, the character of the international sphere is determined not by human biology or anthropology, but rather by the absence of an overarching central authority.

“The requirements of state action,” observes Kenneth Waltz, “are imposed by the circumstances in which all states exist.”
In illustrating the endemic behavioural bias in assistance rendered to needy nations in the international system, Jervis appropriates Rousseau’s ‘parable of the stag’, drawing a parallel between the mind-set of the story’s hunters and that of modern nation-states.

If the men cooperate to ensnare and slay the stag, they will all eat in good measure.
But if one leaves his post to go in pursuit of a rabbit — which provides inferior sustenance — the stag will successfully flee and the remaining huntsmen will be left hungry. Since each person is liable to harbour doubts about whether everybody in the entourage will cooperate, collaboration appears to be the least advantageous option in today’s security matrix.

In essence, policymakers in one state are never able to entirely ascertain the true motivations and objectives of their counterparts in other states.
The “BringBackOurGirls” viral message should therefore be understood from a nomadic reference point — one which is informed by irresolvable uncertainty, the subjective, rather than objective, appraisal of other actors’ capabilities and intentions.

The involvement of United States, Britain and other western nations in Somalia, Djibouti and in Nigeria should be viewed in Rousseau’s “parable of the stag”.
In Africa, as the stakes involved in issues of national security, strike at the very core of a state’s raison d’être, the difficulty of distinguishing defensive and offensive capabilities of foreign interventions should necessarily encourage decision-makers to “prepare for the worst”, even if they themselves bear no aggressive intent.