SECURITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA - AFTER APARTHEID, BEYOND REALISM

In new and challenging ways, southern Africa is faced by the choice be tween two geopolitical courses, characterized by distinctive understan dings of the future of interstate relations and unique appreciations o f the region's security problematic. The traditional policy framework of realism is based on responding to circumstances and events by rote rather than asking the difficult first-order questions-the kind of que stions that create alternative interpretations of 'reality' and conseq uently new policy outcomes. We will argue that looking at security thr ough fresh eyes is of particular importance in southern Africa, since changing times have opened promising avenues for attending to this his torically tragic region's immediate and future security needs. Without a new and critical security discourse the bloody conflicts of the reg ion's past may yet return to mar its future.