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<p>The general objective of the proposed research is to do a needs analysis for the tourism and hospitality industries of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland. This will be followed by an alignment of these industries with the provisions of the General Agreement of Trade in Services, commonly known as GATS, so that a Tourism and Hospitality Services Charter may be moulded that may be used uniformly throughout SACU. The specific objectives of the research are: To analyze impact assessment reports and studies conducted on the Tourism and Hospitality Industries for all five SACU member states with the aim of harmonizing standards, costs and border procedures. To ecognize SACU member states&rsquo / schedule of GATS Commitments, especially in the service sectors being investigated, by improving market access, and to recommend minimal infrastructural development levels to be attained for such sectors&rsquo / support. To make recommendations to harness the challenges faced by the said industries into a working document. To calibrate a uniformity of trade standards in these sectors that shall be used by the SACU membership. To ensure that the template is flexible enough for SACU to easily adopt and use in ongoing bilateral negotiations, for example.</p>

<p>Regional integration is being proposed as a means to development in Southern Africa. As a part of the formal agreements regarding this cooperation, a Protocol on Education in the Southern African Development Community region has been signed. This research set out to compare the higher education systems of two Southern African countries and to examine the extent to which this Protocol has had an impact on national policies and practices. The research sought to investigate this by means of exploring the extent to which the Protocol has provided an institutional frame which is guiding the development of higher education policy in each of the two countries. The findings of the study indicate that the Protocol, rather than providing leadership in the area of education policy, is to a large extent a symbolic document, reflective of norms already existent in national policy in the two countries studied.&nbsp / &nbsp / &nbsp / &nbsp / &nbsp / &nbsp / </p>

<p>The tri-partite initiative in and for Africa has been accompanied by high levels of optimism since its political endorsement in 2008. It provides for an opportunity to resolve a host of problems with regards to regional integration in Eastern and Southern Africa. The overall aim of this study is to explore the prospects and challenges towards realising the Tri-partite Free Trade Area&nbsp / (T-FTA) in and for Africa. This study is pragmatic and implicitly seeks to uncover how the T-FTA could contribute to the African Regional Integration Project (ARIP), given the challenges that&nbsp / regional integration face in Africa. Regional integration has a long and rich history in Africa, which started at thehave been weak since the start and persist in its superficial nature with littledevelopmental impact. The reasons for the lack of meaningful integration in Africa are wide-ranging and span national, regional and system level analytical viewpoints. They encompass&nbsp / areas such as developmental levels, political will, respect for regional architecture, overlapping membership and the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). These factors impact on the&nbsp / integration process in Africa and explain in varied ways why there has been little comprehensive economic integration. The starting point was to define the complex concept of regional integration. The dominant factors that define and affect regional integration in this study are that it is a state-based exercise, driven by economic integration, and influenced by the global political economy of the day. It was determined that Africa has adapted its regional integration strategies according to the shifts and influences in the global political economy on states,&nbsp / emanating from the post WWII period to the present day. The mpact of the global economy on Africa since independence was great and is viewed impact on the integration process. Regional integration is essentially a state to state&nbsp / pursuit for integration. Essentially, regional integration is being pursued by states that are still struggling to consolidate statehood, and this leaves little space to move towards a regional approach. However, given the dynamics of a globalised world, regional integration as a strategy is no longer questioned in Africa and is an important component of its developmental agenda. Clarifying the T-FTA was important, and this was done in order to highlight what the tri-partite initiative is and is not. This provided for an opportunity to&nbsp / investigate what the dominant areas are that have informed the emergence of the tri-partite process. The former was found to be largely economic in nature, focusing on harmonising the trade&nbsp / regimes of COMESA, EAC and SADC as a primary motivation. The tri-partite initiative will facilitate and encourage the harmonisation of trade regimes by stressing market integration,&nbsp / infrastructure development and industrialisation, coupled by a developmental approach. This is promising, as the tri-partite initiative seeks to simultaneously deal with many issues that have&nbsp / been commonly associated with the problems that regional integration face in Africa. When viewing the negotiating context, as well as the principles upon which it is to be based, indicate though, that Africa still favours individual state interest that will be hard to reconcile given that the tri-partite region currently has 26 participant states. In terms of economic integration, the T-FTA&nbsp / seeks to put new generation trade issues on the agenda by including services, movement of persons as well as trade facilitation, all of which have been found to be important in realising a&nbsp / trade in goods agenda that is the focus of regional integration in Africa. Analysing the grassroots realities of the market integration pillar offered some valuable insights towards the purposes&nbsp / of this study. The market integration pillar is inundated with challenges, with Rules of Origin (RoO) being the primary challenge towards consolidating the trade in goods agenda on a tri-partite&nbsp / level. New generation trade issues are going to be equally difficult to realise, given that they have no implementation record in the individual Regional Economic Communities (RECs). Promising though is that trade facilitation has already seen positive results by resolving non tariff barriers in the regions.Infrastructure development is equally challenging, although it provides&nbsp / a significant opportunity to create better connectivity (physical integration) between states. In lot of pan-African goals that directly feed into initiatives of the African Union (AU) pillar has not as yet created any concrete tri-partite plans, so it remains to be seen what can be achieved. Ideally, industrialisation is viewed as the pillar that will solve the supply-side constraints of African&nbsp / economies hence, strengthening the trade in goods agenda in the regions. Even though the T-FTA has practical challenges to implementation, there are at least two underlying factors that&nbsp / indirectly affect the prospects of realising the tripartite initiative. The EPAs are an emergent threat in that they run parallel to tripartite negotiations / and respect for a rules based integration process, are issues that warrant consideration. Fundamentally, in order to achieve a successful T-FTA will require a shift in the way business is done in African integration. African states need&nbsp / to realise that their national interests are best served through cooperation, in meaningful ways. Inevitably this requires good faith as well as ceding some sovereignty towards regional goals. Thus, there is a risk that the T-FTA not realised. The fundamentals of political will, economic polarisation and instability have to be resolved. This will lay an appropriate foundation for the&nbsp / tripartite initiative to be sustainable, with developmental impact. </p>

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This study focuses on the premise that national interests of governments are the primary motivating factors that inform decisions on military interventions. Military strategy remains a principal tool in the attainment, pursuance and safeguarding of these interests. Military intervention is the last resort to a series of options that begin with and continue to inform the dynamic: diplomacy, policing, reliance on alliance action and finally, deterrent or pro-active military action. Military interventions in the 20th century have been undertaken at the multilateral, regional and sub-regional levels in given conflicts by a range of actors. Scholarly questions have been asked about the rationale behind the respective governments’ decisions to undertake these interventions. In the case of this study, which focuses on the SADC coalition of willing nations’ military intervention in the Congo conflict, questions have centred on the following: What was the rationale and motive that led governments of the three countries to undertake the decisions for military intervention in the Congo? Was the intervention an altruistic act by the intervening governments seeking to stop aggression of an ally or was it driven by the personal quests by leaders of these intervening countries to secure their share of the DRC mineral wealth? Or, was it merely a case of the three governments intervening as a coalition in pursuit of their varied interests? What was the strategy that this coalition adopted in pursuit of the member countries interests? It is this attempt to explain and determine the rationale and principal factors that informed the three countries’ decision to intervene in the conflict and the military strategy adopted to safeguard these interests that serve as the focal basis for this study. In trying to answer its key questions, this study uses historical and qualitative approaches in collecting and analysing data not only from both primary and secondary sources but also interviews with participants (some off the record as still serving). Thus, the findings of the research would be analysed critically within the framework of the core objectives of the study, which seek not only to identify and establish how the interests of the governments that intervened in the DRC conflict were the primary motivating factor that informed their decisions on military interventions, but also to ascertain the extent to which the SADC coalition’s military strategy became a principal tool in the attainment and safeguarding of these varying interests as well as how that strategy was utilised as a mechanism for the translation and development of these varying interests into common ones among the intervening countries. Lastly, the study seeks to offer policy suggestions on the execution of future military interventions in African conflicts, particularly at the SADC sub-regional level. Whilst literature on military interventions seems to be informed by realpolitik, with the notions by Barry Buzan (and others) that strong states take decisions to intervene when their geostrategic and economic interests are served, states can also militarily intervene for humanitarian purposes. Using the realist paradigm as a theoretical tool of analysis, the study noted that military intervention can best be understood in terms of the power and interests of particular nation states acting individually or collectively as a coalition using the brand of a sub-regional, regional or even international organisation with or without the mandate of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). An analysis is made on the scholarly legal debates surrounding the decision to intervene by the SADC coalition. The study generally established that the claimed interests that motivated the decisions by the respective governments were generally based on the political, economic and military/security dimensions. A critical evaluation of these respective interests of the interveners show that their interests shifted in regards to the levels of importance (that is primary and secondary level) at the initial stage of the intervention and during the intervention period. The coalition’s military strategy became a tool for attaining, securing and safeguarding of these respective interests. As part of the strategy, the SADC coalition’s Mutual Defence Pact acted as a political and legal guide in the promotion of complimentary and common interests of the interveners. Despite formulating such a military strategy, the unexpected longevity of the intervention impacted on the intervening countries’ logistical capacity to sustain the war effort. An initiative by the DRC government to enter into bilateral business ventures with the respective SADC countries and its awarding of mining concessions to the same was meant to be part, arguably, of sustaining the military intervention. However, this war time economic initiative has raised questions among scholars and policy practitioners on whether or not the decision for intervention by a coalition of these countries was basically underpinned by the quest to attain and safeguard national interests or it was aimed at promoting personal elite interests. Having taken note that the major findings of the study revolve around contentious primary issues relating to foreign policy decision making in the context of military intervention, a number of recommendations are made. These include: · Firstly, the undertaking of cost benefit analyses in regard to political, legal and economic matters prior to a nation’s decision for military intervention; · Secondly, the need for an appropriate and effective sub-regional mechanism guided by a sub-regional legal guide or tool for military intervention that would be utilised within the relevant AU and UN political and military framework; Finally a paradigm shift is needed in the conceptualization of what constitutes national interest. This includes a new theoretical thinking based on unilateral and multilateral military intervention in the present global order which should be based on the global or collective interest where maintenance of international peace, stability and security (more importantly human security) are of primary importance. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

Magister Legum - LLM

The tragic events within the South African Development Community (SADC) countries e.g. Civil war and conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), evoked a rethinking on the pivotal role assigned to the United Nations (UN) and the international community in African conflict resolution. Subsequently, there emerged clarion calls for African solutions to African conflict,. with foreign intervention only playing a complementary role. This unfolding of events put a democratic South Africa in a good stead to take this initiative in the SADC region. In this study, the nature of South Africa's involvement in conflict resolution within SADC region. is outlined. The main objective is to outline reasons which have moulded South African intervention in Lesotho, and its impacts on her perceptions about prospects for future African initiatives in the twenty first century. South Africa adopted a remarkably ambivalent foreign policy towards the region and indeed the rest of the continent. It is however, in the light of that development that a democratic South Africa became a dominant member state within SADC to enable her the capabilities of bringing African solutions (SADC in particular) to African conflicts. It is on this note that South Africa has intervened successfully towards resolving the Lesotho conflicts. South African foreign policy objective of enhancing international peace and security by maintaining efforts towards a lasting resolution of conflicts, stability and security situation in Lesotho achieved, and the general elections were ultimately held. It is however, acknowledged that South African government has made a firm commitment to developing its role as a voice for the global South. In supporting this statement, South Africa should seriously develop a reputation, culture and capacity as a patron of peace promotion which means continuing with investing political will and resources in mediation and human resources, and also engage in a concerted campaign to improve the peace-keeping ability and security mechanisms of the SADC through a commitment of technical and human resources. / (M.Soc.Sc.) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2005