Next month, the 46th Ordinary Summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Heads of State and Government will convene in Durban, hosted by South Africa as current Chair.
Held annually, the Summit is the bloc’s highest decision-making body, setting its overall policy direction and taking key decisions on regional, economic and security issues.
As SADC prepares to convene, it is worth reflecting on the state of democracy across the region and the extent to which the bloc is realising its collective commitment to promote it.
Just this month, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who himself came to power following the military intervention that ousted Robert Mugabe in 2017, signed legislation extending his presidency until 2030.
Last October, Madagascar experienced a military takeover that resulted in President Andry Rajoelina being removed from office and a suspension from the African Union.
That same month, Tanzania's general elections triggered widespread protests amid allegations of electoral irregularities, the suppression of opposition parties and extrajudicial killings by security forces.
Reports suggest that thousands of protesters were killed during the ensuing unrest. Similar scenes unfolded a year earlier in Mozambique following the October 2024 general elections, where post-election protests and the state's violent crackdown left hundreds dead and inflicted significant economic damage.
In these cases and many more, SADC's response has either come too late to prevent crisis and violence or has withheld any serious public condemnation.
SADC’s founding Treaty commits its members to the principles of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It calls for the promotion of “political values, systems and other shared values which are transmitted through institutions which are democratic, legitimate and effective.”
Member states are also committed to preventing unconstitutional changes of power and to holding elections that are free and fair under SADC’s Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections.
While these commitments are regularly reaffirmed in summit communiqués, protocols and strategic plans, SADC continues to find it difficult to hold member states to account when they engage in state repression or actions that undermine democracy and lead to constitutional crises, instability and violence.
The challenge of advancing a collective commitment to democratic norms within SADC is not new and can in part be traced to the origins of the bloc.
SADC’s roots lie in the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), founded in 1980 by the Frontline States as a coalition to reduce economic dependence on South Africa and form a united front against the apartheid regime.
That shared struggle against colonialism and white-minority rule forged deep norms of political solidarity and non-interference.
These norms served the liberation cause well, creating a unified front against the apartheid state and its international allies.
However, they have proven difficult to reconcile with the democratic governance commitments SADC adopted when it reconstituted itself as a regional economic community in 1992.
These commitments call on states to hold one another to account and forge a common set of democratic norms. Instead, the instinct to close ranks and avoid public criticism of fellow members continues to shape how SADC states relate to one another and hinders the bloc’s ability to hold transgressing members to account or effectively intervene in moments of governance crises, which are treated as domestic affairs.
This instinct also extends to how SADC engages with civil society, which the bloc often perceives as foreign-funded interference in domestic affairs.
In 2012, Laurie Nathan, author of Community of Insecurity: SADC’s Struggle for Peace and Security in Southern Africa, argued that SADC states’ unwillingness to surrender a measure of sovereignty to regional structures and embrace a collective security regime encompassing formal rules, binding decision-making and the possibility of interference in domestic affairs has deeply impaired the bloc’s effectiveness on peace and security issues.
Reforming this dynamic will not be easy. SADC has no transcendent status or authority. As Nathan (2012) argues, “the capacity and orientation of a regional organisation derive from and are constrained by, the capacity and orientation of its member states.” This means that as member states drift further towards authoritarianism the bloc will only become less capable of advancing the democratic norms it is treaty-bound to uphold, resulting in a further breakdown of rule of law, conflict and instability.
It also means that the path to reform is most likely to come from a core group of democratic member states who are prepared to push for change. While the current political landscape in the region may not be immediately conducive to this, South Africa, as chair, can work to make incremental but meaningful progress.
To work around the norm of non-interference, South Africa could push for a mechanism enabling SADC to initiate early engagement (whether through preventive diplomacy, fact-finding missions or mediation) without waiting for an explicit invitation from the affected state.
A member state could, of course, still refuse entry to a SADC mission but the point is to raise the diplomatic cost of refusal and shift the burden of justification onto the state that blocks engagement rather than the region that seeks it.
There is continental precedent for this. Article 4 (h) of the AU’s Constitutive Act, grants it the right to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances.
Article 25 of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 1999 Mechanism Protocol similarly allows for intervention without expressed consent of the state in question.
This provision has been effectively invoked by ECOWAS on more than one occasion, most recently during The Gambia’s 2016–17 constitutional crisis. These instruments could be drawn on to model a mechanism suited to the region's history and norms around non-interference.
Such a mechanism would define specific triggers, such as the scale of civilian casualties, the suspension of constitutional processes or a government's sustained refusal to engage, that automatically activate SADC's diplomatic machinery.
This would make it harder for a single member to obstruct a SADC diplomatic mission while still respecting the principle that intervention should be proportionate and criteria-driven.
Another area South Africa could advance under its tenure as chair is the question of SADC’s engagement with civil society on peace and security issues.
Historically, SADC has been relatively more open to engaging civil society on its regional integration agenda but there has been no structured channel for civil society input into the Organ’s work on governance, conflict prevention and related peace and security matters.
While the involvement of civil society in track-one mediation may not be appropriate, civil society can play an important role in early warning and provide valuable knowledge of local security dynamics.
The ECOWAS Early Warning and Response Network (ECOWARN), for example, integrates civil society into its early warning and conflict prevention work through a network of CSOs that collect information on the ground and feed it to the regional body.
Similar initiatives could be developed within the SADC Mediation, Conflict Prevention and Preventive Diplomacy Structure (MCPPD), which comprises the Panel of Elders (PoE), the Mediation Reference Group (MRG) and the Mediation Support Unit (MSU), strengthening the bloc’s early warning capabilities and enabling more effective preventive diplomacy and mediation.
Rather than hoping the next crisis produces a more cooperative host government, South Africa should use its tenure as chair to champion measures that address the structural design challenges at the heart of SADC’s limitations and push for mechanisms that enable earlier engagement, lower the barriers to preventive diplomacy and create space for civil society to contribute to the bloc’s peace and security work.
Stephen Buchanan-Clarke is a security analyst who serves as head of the Peace and Security Programme and Good Governance Africa.