Treaty Of The Southern African Development Community

This book, published in July 2006, significantly complements the burgeoning literature on regional integration in Africa. It is the most up-to-date guide to SADC's history and institutions, its policies and programmes, legal underpinnings and position in unfolding continental and global affairs. It offers a frank analysis of SADC's shortcomings, achievements and prospects and reviews its extensive restructuring.

Using various case studies as well as legal, communication, and awareness perspectives, this book examines the nexus of the people of Southern Africa, democratization, and integration in the SADC region.

This book analyses whether the design of the institutions of Southern African Development Community (SADC) reflects the community’s treaty objectives and principles of democracy and the rule of law. The author provides a detailed analysis of the policy making and oversight institutions of SADC. Additionally, the project looks at institutional and legal frameworks of similar organisations (the East African Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the European Union) for comparative purposes. This work is written largely from a legal perspective, specifically international institutional law; however, it carries cross-disciplinary themes, including governance, and especially the subject of public policy making at the international level.

Exploring the formation, evolution and effectiveness of the regional security arrangements of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Nathan examines a number of vital and troubling questions: * why has SADC struggled to establish a viable security regime? * why has it been unable to engage in successful peacemaking?, and * why has it defied the optimistic prognosis in the early 1990s that it would build a security community in Southern Africa? He argues that the answers to these questions lie in the absence of common values among member states, the weakness of these states and their unwillingness to surrender sovereignty to the regional organization. Paradoxically, the challenge of building a co-operative security regime lies more at the national level than at the regional level. The author's perspective is based on a unique mix of insider access, analytical rigour and accessible theory.

Using political and public administration perspectives, this book argues that for democratization and integration to be consolidated and institutionalized, direct involvement of the people of Southern Africa is paramount. Democratization and integration are about people, the sovereigns, and not merely the abstract actors called nation states.