Prospects for Peace and Development in Southern Africa in the 1990s: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives

As we move into the final decade of the twentieth century, the struggle for peace and development in Southern Africa continues. Recent events - national, regional, and global - suggest that the long battle against apartheid may soon be over. In South Africa, Mandela has been released, the ANC unbanned, and the Pretoria Minute provides the point of departure for talks about talks. Nambia is now independent. Embattled regimes in Angola and Mozambique have begun negotiating with formerly unrecognized guerrilla movements toward peace and reintegration. It would seem then that prospects for peace, development, and the lifting of racial oppression have never looked better in the sub-continent. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it may seem that this process is fragmented, fragile, and by no means assured of success. This collection of essays taken from an international symposium held at Dalhousie University to coincide with Nambia’s independence focuses on these and other recent events in order to assess the prospects for peace and development in this region in the 1990s, and speculate on the role to be played by external state and non-state actors therein. By emphasising the post-Cold War, post-destabilization, structural adjustment policies period, this monograph seeks to make a novel contribution to the on going debates about development, democracy, and a post-apartheid South and Southern Africa. Co-published with the Dalhousie University Centre for African Studies.