Despite its rhetoric about prioritising Africa and the need for an African Renaissance, South Africa's leadership is severely constrained by domestic political factors in its ability to engage and lead the continent. To date, the ANC-led government has been criticised for its incoherent foreign policy. Most criticisms have centered on South Africa's failure to engage the SADC region effectively. This research, examines the importance attached to South Africa getting involved in the region and the rationale guiding its involvement. Employing realism as a technique of assessment, the study examines the factors that influenced South Africa's actions or inactions. The ANC (African National Congress) -led government must concern itself with several issues that can muffle efforts by the state to intervene or act in concert with members of the region. Such issues include a historical (apartheid-induced) antipathy toward Africa, a 40 percent unemployment rate amongst its main racial constituents, a very vocal and demagogic opposition, large minorities with little or no interest in developing extensive links with the region, and the ever-present need to contest and win domestic elections. Given this internal context as well as the general desire to lead and effect change within the region and to improve her international prestige (for instance, by securing a permanent seat on the UN Security Council or bids for major sporting events), South Africa will find herself torn between domestic and external imperatives. As such, the ability or capacity of the South African government to act effectively in conflict resolution missions within Africa will be shaped substantially by how well it is able to attend to, and reconcile, those tensions. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

M.A. (Politics) / This study was concerned with the relations of South Africa and international actors in the Southern African region. It was noticed that there was a shortage of quantitative studies, especially on international behaviour. in South Africa. For this reason a quantitative method, events-analysis, was used. The method quantifies actions of states over a period of time; the period January 1982 to December 1982 was used in the present study. Relations in Southern Africa were researched through hypotheses concerning reciprocal relations. issues and conflictive or co-operative behaviour. The actors studied include states such as Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Non-state actors such as Swapo, the ANC, Unita and the PAC were also taken into consideration. It was found that the relations between South Africa and international actors in Southern Africa were reciprocal. Conflictive actions evoked conflictive reactions whereas co-operative actions evoked co-operative reactions. It was of interest that relations were mostly issue-orientated. The issues studied were security, economic, territorial and political. S.W.A./Namibia was also included as an issue. Security issues totally dominated relations in Southern Africa. Actions concerning security issues were found to be mostly conflictive and largely connected to the actor's attitude towards the ANC. Relations between South Africa and states such as Mozambique and Lesotho were very conflictive. These two states were outspoken supporters of the ANC. Quite the reverse applied to states such as Swaziland and Botswana. Neither of them supports the ANC materially and relations with South Africa were therefore more co-operative.

This study attempts to make a contribution to the debate on the role of South Africa within Southern African Development Community. An attempt is made to analyse this role within the context of regional integration debate. This role has been conceptualised within the dichotomies of hegemon versus partner. The study argues that South Africa is a hegemon in the region of SADC, and that given its overarching economic dominance and it has the potential of establishing its hegemony in the region. It maintains that there are several factors, which could facilitate South Africa's hegemonic dominance such as in military, technology and manufacturing sector. It concludes by arguing that given the changing geopolitical factors both within the region and the globe impedes South Africa from firmly expressing this hegemonic dominance. Furthermore, South Africa's pioneering role in the struggle to change the status quo globally in favour of the Southern states is another crucial factor, which imposes limitations on its hegemonic intentions regionally.

This thesis examines South Africa's foreign relations, viewed from a South African perspective, with the black African countries beyond southern Africa from 1961 to 1994. These relations were determined by the conflict between Pretoria's apartheid ideology on the one hand, and African continental rejection of South Africa's race discrimination policies and its exclusion from the community of African states on the other. The documentary material used primarily stems from the Department of Foreign Affairs archive in Pretoria, supplemented by research conducted in other archives. Furthermore, we conducted interviews and correspondence, and consulted the relevant primary and secondary literature. Given the main source of information, we chose to make this work a case study in Diplomatic History. In consequence, and constituting the core of the study, Chapters 3 to 6 explore the interaction between South Africa and the black African states in a chronological order. At the same time, we draw on the analytical concepts from the academic disciplines of Political Science and its derivative, International Relations, to comprehend developments more fully. We discuss the significance of the approaches from these two disciplines in both the Introduction and Chapter 2. In particular, we emphasise that this study is about Pretoria's foreign policy, involving state and non-state actors, and we suggest that the unequal status between South Africa and the other African states constitutes an inherent factor in the relationship between them. The Conclusion examines the role of the state and non-state actors in determining Pretoria's foreign relations and the relevance of the structural imbalance between South Africa and the black African states in this context.