Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity: Human Rights, Zimbabwe’s “Land Crisis” and South Africa’s “Quiet Diplomacy”

Abstract

The South African government’s foreign policy stance toward Zimbabwe’s land redistribution crisis, and the wider political crisis of which it is a pivotal element, is often portrayed as confused, contradictory, and marked by failure (“Speak Out” 2003)— particularly in light of South Africa’s foundational commitment to make human rights a central “pillar” of its post-apartheid foreign policy. In this essay we illustrate the interpretive purchase of viewing the African National Congress’s (ANC) ambivalence and preference for “quiet diplomacy” through a lens that admits a complex of historically contingent identities co-extant in the “rainbow nation.”