India-Africa and Indian Ocean Regional Arrangements: Regional Security Challenges and Concerns

Abstract

Regional cooperation was a growing feature of post-cold war global politics. With the changing global reality, countries among and around Indian Ocean are also relying to integrate their economic and security policy in accordance to the regional needs and conditions. They emphasized on regional institutional arrangements and engagement as such institutions are implicitly designed to promote stability, conflict avoidance and collective viability of their communities by encouraging integration among their members. Indian Ocean’s recent history illustrates the geopolitical dynamics concerning British hegemony in the Indian Ocean and the escalation of superpower rivalry during Cold War. It left the IOR countries with a common historical experience of European imperialism and a sense of shared identity. It seems logical for the IOR countries to rediscover the past littoral economic, social and cultural community of an ocean-centric, regional, co-operative grouping serving as a bridgehead between Africa and Asia. Although maritime oceanic thread binds the littorals together, maritime cooperation and maritime issues have not attained the importance they deserve in this region. However, the dissimilarities in state capabilities (both economic and military) are also considerable. India and South Africa each have a blue water naval capability and a booming economy, while the smaller island nations can hardly compare. For both South Africa and India, the Indian Ocean is an arena of economic and geostrategic importance. The more recent piracy problem linked to the ongoing malaise in the Horn of Africa has created security challenges, largely about keeping the SLOCs open. In fact, there are two key threats to Indian Ocean security: the instability of certain littoral states such as Somalia, Myanmar and Pakistan on one hand and the rise of the non-state actors perpetrating piracy, terrorism and the narcotics trade, on the other. This paper is intended to analyze the major threats in IOR, and underline India-Africa engagement through various regional arrangements in order to effective management of these regional challenges. However, the paper assumes no one country is capable of controlling these threats in isolation; multilateral co-operation is being needed in order to tackle these challenges.