Argues that, despite South Africa's manipulation of state structures and elites in the region for its own ends, the suffering endured under the apartheid regime drew the region together at the popular level and that economic factors, such as the use of migrant labour, reinforced the process of integration.

New beginning - a new beginning, one way out ... and in, knowing security the southern African way, traps, tricks, and tropes, toward community and emancipation, the South African moment, knowledge and its production, sovereignty's sins, the closing of frontiers, first among unequals; making South Africa's security - truth and truisms, tales of difference, tall and epic tales, tales of change, security tales; writing migration as neoapartheid - picking up bad habits, Pretoria's hobbesians, history, migration, and the new South Africa, migrancy in the making of South African power, writing migration as neoapartheid; ordering Southern Africa - dream, diatribe, and discourse, intervention - the pathway from pariahhood, the unstated problem of memory, so far from God; continuity and community - theorizing community, sovereign compromise, sovereignty, saints, and sinners; primus inter pares?, the task of critical theory, security and its making; the dimly witted power of intellectuals; toward emancipation.

This analysis of South Africa's postapartheid security system moves beyond a realist discussion of interacting states to examine Southern Africa as an integrated whole. Despite South Africa's manipulation of state structures and elites in the region for its own ends, the text argues, the suffering endured under the apartheid regime drew the region together at the popular level, and economic factors such as the use of migrant labor reinforced the process of integration. Exploring how the region is changing today--as transnational solidarity and a single regional economy remove the distinctions between national and international politics--the book explores whether South African domination can finally be overcome and considers what sort of cosmopolitan political arrangement will be appropriate for southern Africa in the new century.