South Africa in the Changing Political Configurations of Africa

This is not so much a review of the collection of essays edited by Adebajo, Adedeji, and Landsberg, as it is a review of the state of the fields reflected in these essay: conflict and development studies, economics, international relations, political science and political economy, regionalisms, and so on. Its publication comes at a time of intense reflection in South Africa on a set of interrelated postapartheid issues: post-elections, post-global crisis, post-Mbeki, etc.—although it dates from an earlier period, as these papers were originally presented at a conference in Stellenbosch in 2004. The volume also appears near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century—just as, within the "global South," a fundamental divide is increasingly evident between the few emerging economies of the BRICs (the growing powers of Brazil-India-China) and the fifty or so fragile or failed "other" states.

In turn, novel forms of "global governance" have been designed to manage such unequal relationships—such as the Ottawa and Kimberley Processes involving myriad, heterogeneous coalitions of actors. Whether intentional or not, this compilation of fourteen chapters by fifteen authors, more than half of whom are women, reflects an emerging debate about whether the field of "African" international relations is less state-centric and more transnational than is true for other regions. The principal strength of this symposium lies in its debate about the state of southern Africa in particular (in chapters 1, 4, 5, and 11). Here I suggest four sets of related issues, analytic and applied, that emerge from these discussions carried out at the turn of the decade.

First, given the role of nonstate actors in "public diplomacy," do international relations in Africa reflect the presence of more such nonstate network diplomacy than elsewhere? How coherent are the various initiatives of South African hegemony now so apparent on the continent, including peacekeeping operations in the Congo (chapter 12)? And do these institutions advance new forms of regionalism, such as represented in the Maputo Corridor, or the "trans-frontier peace parks," or the European Union (E.U.)-defined "Economic Partnership Agreements" (EPAs)? Alternatively, Chinese monetary and aid institutions are beginning to carve out new spheres of influence, not just in energy and minerals but also in industrial and agricultural sectors: does this suggest movement away from the "Washington consensus" toward an emergent "Beijing consensus" following the demise of the former before the decade's end?

Second, following Goldman Sachs's identification and popularization of the BRICs, in mid-decade Goldman Sachs extended its purview to the N-11, a group of the" next-eleven" countries or "near-BRICs." Controversially, why does this set exclude South Africa? Is South Africa considered part of IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) and the "Outreach 5" associated with the G8 summits—as formalized in the last several years through the "Heiligendamm Process"—but not considered as a "near-BRIC" (i.e., excluded from the N-11)? In turn, between the rise of the NICs (Newly Industrializing Countries), before the Asian crisis, and of the BRICs, prior to the global crisis, a further set of "developmental states" were increasingly recognized in the continent, including Botswana and Mauritius (as noted in chapter 1).

Third, does Africa present more contemporary security issues than any other region? It is already notorious for the presence of ebola, HIV/AIDS (see chapter 8) and other pathogens, along with the ubiquitous nexus of drugs, gangs, guns—and young males. But in addition to long-enduring conflicts over energy and mineral resources, might Africa also become the vortex of conflicts around water, land, and food exacerbated by climate change (chapters 7, 12 and 13), leading to massive movements of environmental refugees among a host of other problems? Indeed, generations of African diasporas (both within and beyond the continent) already affect public diplomacy...