With the end of the cold war, the independence of Namibia in 1990 and the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, the Southern African region entered an era of relative political stability and competitive multi-party politics. But the peace dividend proved unable to finance the hopes and promises, and more and more political analysts point to the "mixed bag" of democratisation processes.
Of concern is the marked shift towards authoritarianism in some of the Southern African Development Community countries. [[i]] Since the early 2000s, the region has also seen a surge of foreign direct investment in its extractive economies (driven by growth in China and India) and in the digital economy, with its strategic importance for the global economy. Both these trends have received significant coverage, with democratisation pundits emphasising good governance and participation in election cycles, and economic analysts looking at growth and investment forecasts in commodities like cobalt, copper, platinum, uranium and rare earth minerals.
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