The Great Lakes Region (GLR) Security Complex: Lessons for the African Solutions for Peace and Security (AfSol) Approach

Abstract

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.