ABSTRACT
South Africa underwent a profound change in the early 1990s with a non-racial constitution agreed between the apartheid regime and the African National Congress-led liberation alliance. After years of sanctions and boycott, South Africa became a legitimate member of the world community assuming a seat in the United Nations General Assembly. Through an overview of earlier literature, in this chapter we will describe South Africa’s evolving post-1994 foreign policy from the early commitment to international peace, just economic development, and promotion of African interests in world affairs to the idea of “African Renaissance”, membership in BRICS and aspirations of multipolar international order. Our analysis of South Africa’s international ordering vision in terms of its distributional, normative, institutional, and temporal dimensions in the 2022 Department of International Affairs document “South Africa’s national interest and its advancement in a global environment”, and – as an example of a concrete foreign policy decision – the South African appeal to International Court of Justice against Israel’s aggression towards Gaza in 2023 illustrate the significance but also tensions in the normative, human-rights dimension of that vision. Exploration of the opposition parties’ foreign policy views reveals further discontents in that regard.
