Twenty Years on, It's All Academic: Progressive South African Scholars and Moral Foreign Policy After Apartheid

South Africa, Antarctica, and the ATS: An Unrealized Foreign Policy Leadership Opportunity

“…Critics have pointed to the relative decline and lesser influence of South Africa in international relations in recent years, and a perceived inability in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) to prioritise the elements of the country's foreign policy. The former criticism relates particularly to three features: loss of the immediate postapartheid moral stature enjoyed by South Africa (Spies 2012, p.80); the tension between the country's emerging middle power status and role as a regional hegemon versus its ideological commitment to continental and South-South partnership (Alden & Veira 2005, pp.1083-1084Bond in Spies 2012, p.78); and South Africa's uneasy diplomatic relationship with neighbouring Zimbabwe under the Mugabe dictatorship (Landsberg 2010), while the latter critique rests on two components: the elusive articulation between the national interests of South Africa and the Republic's official foreign policy (Landsberg 2010;Moore 2013), and the unresolved issues of 'priorities, focus and recognition of limitations of both resources and political capital' (Leon 2013, p.450) in the White Paper on South Africa's Foreign Policy (DIRCO 2012).…”

South Africa’s multiple faces in current climate clubs

“…This aspect of climate policy appears less dynamic than the first two, but is of equal importance, with a third of South African trade and investment flowing to and from these countries (Moore 2013). 52 Additionally, the EU and its member states provide significant funding to enhance domestic climate policy processes. The South African government is generally open to multilateral and minilateral cooperation generally and in the climate space specifically.…”