A Socio-Historical Approach to Regional Organizational Relations? NGOs in Gender Security in the SADC Region
- Authors: Nedziwe, Cecilia L
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445278 , vital:74370 , https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.57.1
- Description: The extant academic literature in the field of regional International Relations has paid little attention to non-state actors’ organizational relations in building region-ness. Yet, the region offers sets of organizational relations outside, alongside, and as part of the formal regional state structures to do with gender, which offer insights into non-state regional relations and thus help to fill the lacunae in the field and facilitate understanding of the regional dynamic of international relations. This article examines how organizational relations of non-state actors in gender security play out in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. It highlights the shortcomings of the inter-governmental approach to international relations pursued by various scholars. Drawing on interviews with representatives of NGOs, governments, the SADC, and annual reports, as well as the academic literature, it argues for a socio-historical approach to understanding regional organization and transnationalism, which considers African agency in building region-ness.
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- Date Issued: 2024
Transnational Activities of Women-Focused Civil Society Actors in Southern Africa
- Authors: Nedziwe, Cecilia L , Tella, Oluwaseun
- Date: 2023
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445327 , vital:74376 , ISBN 978-3-031-29536-2 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29537-9
- Description: Since the 1990s, the opening up of democratic spaces has been characterised by growing transnational activities and regionalisation of non-state actors. In Southern Africa, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) began to recognise civil society actors and to integrate and prioritise gender and women issues within their policymaking structures. 1 This was assisted by the formulation of norms at a global level which could be diffused to regional and national policies, leading to greater non-state activity in the SADC area. It was achieved through, firstly, the establishment of an eminent group of commissioners in the early 1990s to review the situation of women across the region. Secondly, following the 1995 Beijing International Women’s Conference, a task force was created to draft a Regional Plan of Action to begin to address gendered insecurities across Southern Africa. Finally, the first meeting of the SADC Ministers Responsible for Women and Gender Affairs was convened in 1997 (Made and Morna, 2009: 34).
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- Date Issued: 2023