Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in the field of International Relations, at the
University of the Witwatersrand, 2016 / In the early 1990s South Africa left the Apartheid-era and transformed into a country based on
liberal democratic principles such as freedom and human rights. The soon to be inaugurated
president, Nelson Mandela, promised that South Africa would base its new foreign policy on these
same principles and the pursuit of the international human rights agenda. Initially this seemed to
be the case; South Africa signed on to most international human rights conventions and even acted
on these principles condemning Nigeria when the ruling regime executed human rights activists.
However, once the country gradually began adopting neoliberal ideological positions, first
domestically then in its foreign policy, the prominence of human rights in South Africa’s foreign
policy began to wane. This is evidenced in South Africa’s actions on international organisations
as well as the country’s approach to human rights challenges such as the Zimbabwean crisis in the
early 2000s and the furore over planned visit of the Dalai Lama in 2011.
Using a hermeneutic approach it is possible to gain an ontological understanding of the process by
which this move towards neoliberalism lead to a economisation and commodification of South
Africa’s foreign policy between 1994-2014. This in turn undermined the liberal democratic
principles which underpinned the country’s international relations leading to a relegation of the
human rights agenda to a subsequent by product which can be achieved through greater market
liberalisation. / MT2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/21858 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Von Essen, Brendan Craig |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (96 leaves), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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