Rights, region and identity: exploring the ambiguities of South Africa's regional human rights role

Abstract

The ANC government's regional human rights role has often been portrayed as confused, contradictory, and marked by failure, in light of South Africa's commitment to make human rights a central ‘pillar’ of its post‐apartheid foreign policy, and its position of relative power in the region. We argue that the government's choices of ‘quiet diplomacy’, its preference for multilateralism, and its sensitivity to considerations of ‘African solidarity’ become more intelligible when interpreted through the prism of the identity imperatives bearing on the ‘new’ South Africa. Without discounting the explanatory power of interest‐based analyses, we seek to broaden the debate and highlight the multi‐dimensionality of South Africa's rights‐based foreign policy. In particular, the government finds itself torn between contradictory commitments to both African solidarity and global integration, implying distinct developmental models and rights emphases (social and economic versus civil and political) respectively. We illustrate the interpretive purchase of the complex yet powerful concept of identity for explaining these dynamics through case studies of South Africa's response to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe.