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ABSTRACT
Research on South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy decision-making has stagnated. For more than a quarter century analysts have generally drawn on secondary material from other scholars, newspaper reporting, and the speeches of government officials to elucidate how South Africa crafts and carries out its foreign policy. The accessibility of previously classified archival documents and the availability of policy makers for research interviews holds the potential to advance scholarship on South African foreign policy along two fronts. First, these primary sources offer insight into foreign policy decision-making processes. And second, they encourage a critical re-evaluation of many of the traditional understandings and tropes that have dominated the study of South African foreign policy. This paper outlines the state of foreign policy studies in South Africa and then demonstrates the power of primary research to alter key ideas about the conduct and content of South African foreign policy through three case studies.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank John Siko, Amy Niang, Tony Trew and two anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback they provided. I am also grateful for the time and reflections of the officials who sat down with me for research interviews. Finally, I appreciate the willingness of the South Africa Institute of International Affairs to host two events at which earlier versions of this work were presented.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Schoeman also includes a third category, ‘pure theory’, but found that very little IR scholarship produced in South Africa fits under the ‘pure theory’ classification. Smith (Citation2013, 538) echoes the categorisation of Schoeman and emphasises that ‘Particularly in the field of foreign policy, published work is often largely of a descriptive, atheoretical, and policy prescriptive nature’.
2 For examples of edited volumes that generally adhere to this format see Sidiropoulos (Citation2004) and Adebajo and Virk (Citation2018).
3 A notable exception is Van Nieuwkerk’s (Citation2006) dissertation that draws on primary data and uses Graham Allison’s three models to provide a theoretically grounded and empirically novel analysis.
4 Siko’s comment nicely gets at the distinction between ‘Policy Related / Descriptive’ work that assesses the ‘outputs’ of the foreign policy making process, and research on foreign policy decision-making, which explains how the policy is made.
5 Nelson Mandela, “Notes on SADC Meeting,” September 1997, Blantyre, Malawi. Nelson Mandela Personal Papers (NMPP), 2009/8, Box 5, File 3, Pages 8–19. Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF), Johannesburg. And, Nelson Mandela, “Notes Following a Meeting with Laurent Kabila,” May 15, 1997, Cape Town, NMPP, 2009/8, Box 4, File 2, Pages 1–4, NMF, Johannesburg.
6 For an example of the material on the China-Taiwan dilemma stored at the at University of Fort Hare, National Heritage Cultural Studies Centre see the correspondence in Nelson Mandela Papers (NMP), Box 294, Folders 21–23. For documents pertaining to the Lesotho crisis in the early 1990s see NMP, Box 297, Folders 49–50.
7 “Zaire: Second Meeting with Kabila,” May 5, 1997, US Department of State, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Doc No. C06215420, and “Zaire: Richardson-Mbeki Meeting,” May 6, 1997, US Department of State, FOIA, Doc No. C06215433.
8 “Deputy President Mbeki on Mandela Libya-Relate Comments and Democratic Congo,” October 24, 1997, US Department of State, FOIA, Doc No. C06220426.
9 “Outstanding Contributions of South Africa,” 1 June 1994. United Nations Archives, Folder S-1086-0052-06-00002, pages 72–77.
10 A wealth of primary information on the Mandela Administration’s foreign policy that was discovered during the research for Dare Not Linger can be accessed at: https://tpy.nelsonmandela.org/pages/part-v-africa-and-the-world.
11 Most recently, the Foreign Affairs article has been used to present Mandela’s views and treated uncritically in Mngomezulu (Citation2020), and in many of the chapters of Adebajo and Virk (Citation2018).
12 Moore (Citation2013) also addresses the role of academics in the formation of the ANC’s early foreign policy.
13 For a helpful example of this ferment on economic policy see Lodge (Citation1999).
14 During a 1994 military uprising in Lesotho Mandela seriously considered sending in a regional force to quell the instability (Motau Interview, 2019 and Legwaila Interview, 2019).
15 See Hyslop (Citation2014) for an examination of Mandela’s views on the use of military force.
16 Thakur (Citation2015) makes the argument that the ANC was more focused on re-establishing South Africa’s identity as part of the Global South and especially Africa than it was with promoting human rights.
17 The two ANC foreign policy documents that academics exerted a considerable degree of influence on are Foreign Policy in a New Democratic South Africa: A Discussion Paper produced in October Citation1993 and Foreign Policy Perspective in a Democratic South Africa published in December Citation1994 (Graham Citation2015). The next ANC foreign policy paper, Developing a Strategic Perspective on South African Foreign Policy, which came out in July Citation1997, was influenced less by academics, who had been ‘largely marginalized’ by that time according to Moore (Citation2013, 560). The 1997 document, not surprisingly, advocates a much more circumspect approach to promoting human rights.
18 For a similar view on the subject see Le Pere and van Nieuwkerk (Citation2006) and Van Wyk (Citation2019). Maloka (Citation2019, 14) is the only author to depart from this view. He describes ‘the Desk’ as the ‘engine room for foreign policy formulation and execution’.
19 TBVC refers to the four homelands created by the apartheid government: Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei and Venda.
20 Barber (Citation2004) also highlights this issue.
21 Muller (Citation1999b, 197) argues that this episode ‘smacks of some bypassing of the Ministry’ since Mandela did not inform the DFA of his decision to switch before announcing the move, and, because he did not adhere to all the DFA’s suggestions regarding how such a move should be handled. This misses the bigger point that the policy suggested by the DFA prevailed, and, that the DFA’s reporting and analysis contributed to Mandela’s ultimate decision.
22 For further confirmation of the use of the South African example during the 1997 talks with UNITA see Mankahlana (Citation1998).
23 Mngomezulu’s (Citation2020) explanation of why historians have not contributed more to the scholarship on South African foreign policy does not take the opening of South African archives into account.
24 For how the disciplines of diplomatic history and international relations can complement one another see Elman and Elman (Citation1997).
25 For example, on the China-Taiwan dilemma (Williams and Hurst Citation2018) and on relations with Nigeria after the execution of Sani Abacha (Gevisser Citation2007).