The link between security and development has been rediscovered after 9/11 by a broad range of scholars. Focusing on southern Africa, The Security-Development Nexus shows that the much-debated linkage is by no means a recent invention. Rather, the security/development linkage has been an important element of the state policies of colonial as well as post-colonial regimes during the Cold War, and it seems to be prospering in new configurations under the present wave of democratic transitions.

Contributors focus on a variety of contexts from South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia, to Zimbabwe and Democratic Congo.

They explore the nexus and our understanding of security and development through the prism of peace-keeping interventions, community policing, human rights, gender, land contests, squatters, nation and state-building, social movements, disarmament and reintegration programmes and the different trajectories democratisation has taken in different parts of the region.