A poststructuralist enquiry into South Africa's human rights-oriented foreign policy

Abstract

Scholars have critiqued the conduct of South Africa’s foreign policy in international forums as being inimical to its human rights-oriented identity. They argue that this conduct has assaulted South Africa’s respected stature as the champion of human rights in institutions of global governance. Expectedly, these scholars anchor their argument on, among others, the 1993 scholarly article in the Foreign Affairs journal penned by the then African National Congress (ANC) to argue for South Africa to return to its human rights identity. A common thread among these scholarly appraisals is the use of what Hansen (2016: 96) calls “the power of language” as a discursive tool to represent South Africa’s foreign policy in purely normative and essentialist terms. Of course, this representation is often mobilised or deployed when there is a sense or a perception that the government of the day is veering from or betraying its values that are supposed to be enshrined in its foreign policy.

Twenty-one articles of scholars were sampled and subjected to critical discourse analysis. Using a poststructuralism approach and taking a cue from Dembour’s (2010) human rights mapping field, this study unmasked the deployment of the “power of language” (Hansen, 2016: 96). The researcher’s complexified Dembour’s (2010) mapping field confirmed that most scholars are framing human rights through the lens of the natural school, followed by the deliberative school with the protest school and the discourse school trailing behind. The implications are that readers are often exposed to ideations that are more liberally and transcendentally oriented and less to those that are linguistically and societally oriented. These results show that those who are essentialising South Africa’s human right-oriented foreign policy tend to regurgitate words of either leaders of the ANC leaders or government officials and that other aspects of South Africa’s foreign policy such as democracy, solidarity, African renaissance, South-South cooperation and the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment are often subordinated.