Part IV: contemporary challenges and emerging issues.

1. INTRODUCTION

The official viewpoint is that South Africa does not face any direct military threat to its national security, compromising its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Such a threat, particularly of an external nature, is also not foreseen in the foreseeable future. This does not imply the absence of insecurity. Since security is not an absolute, various insecurities, vulnerabilities and risks impact on or may constitute threats to national security. Irrespective of whether their referent object is the region, state, regime, government, community or humanity at large, these insecurities are identified and dealt with by various government departments and agencies through proactive measures, policy programmes and plans of action.

No official, systematic threat analysis of South Africa's strategic environment is presented to the general public on a regular basis. Various techniques, including environment scanning, early warning, intelligence estimates, risk assessments and threat analyses, are nevertheless used within the defence and security communities. The findings thereof are seldom reported in public, mainly due to their classified nature but also to avoid an alarmist public response. Aspects thereof, however, find their way into speeches, statements, parliamentary debates, budget bills, annual reports, policy reviews and white papers, although seldom in an explicit and comprehensive manner.

Accordingly, within the South African public domain, perspectives of vulnerabilities, insecurities, adversarial relations and menacing intentions and capacities that constitute real, potential or perceived threats to security, more specifically national security threats, are expressed in a twofold manner. Firstly, as real threats to security and, secondly, as a range of interrelated and mutually dependent vulnerabilities that may constitute real or potential threats to security. The former includes three specific threats, namely the threat of terrorism, of nuclear proliferation and of transnational organised crime (although not necessarily crime in general). The latter phenomena are not officially designated 'threats' and various terms are used to denote them, amongst others, challenges (being the preferred concept), issues, emergencies, areas of concern, concerns, vulnerabilities, risks and impacts. These 'challenges', to use a common denominator, range from globalism, through the whole spectrum of human security issues, to the African diaspora.

In terms of 'new security thinking', the latter category of 'challenges' reflects the broadening and deepening of security and the inclusion of non-military dimensions and non-state subjects of security. Whether and to what extent these 'challenges' actually constitute threats to (national) security--or whether they are mere global, regional or national policy problems, or even sub-national service delivery issues that serve as a context for or a source of threats--remains contested and is not only a topic of academic debate, but also a matter of political choice. Furthermore, it is contended that contrary to the traditional security paradigm--with its emphasis on the prior existence of state and regime interests and identities as referent objects of security--the contemporary, official South African perspectives of security and security threats are partially embedded in a constructivist approach. Accordingly, security and security threats are changing social constructs, intersubjectively constituted through social interaction, that transcend pre-defined, empirically determined and objectively assessed security threats. Irrespective of the semantics involved and the indecisive outcome of this discourse, these 'challenges'--at the level of rhetoric--provide a basic indication of perceived or potential security 'threats' that, as causes for concern, elicit an official policy response from the South African government. Hence they are included in this section.

A further problem is the securitisation of issues that previously fell outside the domain of traditional security thinking. Apart from the fact that human security per definition securitises a range of related issues and vulnerabilities, securitisation has become more prominent in South Africa because various issues are designated in security terms, amongst others environmental, food, water and energy security. Presently these issues are neither militarised, nor significantly securitised as security threats, although their conflict-generating potential is recognised. The lack or limited securitisation of these issues is evidenced by the fact that government departments and agencies that do not form part of the South African defence and security communities manage them. Where relevant, these issues are drawn into intergovernmental structures and dealt with by the ministerial clusters.

There is also an apparent underemphasis or omission of certain contentious issues in the official perceptions represented by this selection. These include the issues of Zimbabwe, HIV/AIDS, and the movement of people. In the case of HIV/AIDS, similar to crime, more emphasis is placed on social context, statistical data, policy programmes and action plans, than on their direct and indirect safety and security impact. Furthermore, HIV/AIDS is incorporated into human security and viewed in a broader socio-economic context linked to poverty and development. The crisis in Zimbabwe and the consequences thereof are not officially regarded as security threats to South Africa, but as a foreign policy issue dealt with through multilateral diplomacy. The movement of people (for example displaced persons, refugees and migrants) is seen as either the result of conflict or as part of the human security spectrum, and thus also not as a security threat.