Explaining Co-operation and Conflict in Southern Africa: State-building, Foreign Policy and Regional Order

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1988, the Southern African regional system was marked by high levels of systemic conflict involving direct and indirect armed confrontation between South Africa and its neighbours. This reality sharply contrasts with the co-operative environment that has gradually formed since 1989. Following the trends towards deepening and widening the systemic comprehen-sion of international relations, this study seeks to understand why there were changes in the pattern of co-operation–conflict in the Southern African regional system in the last 40 years. The central hy-pothesis is that (i) the state-building process and (ii) regional and secondary powers' foreign policy formation and execution towards the regional order are factors which have directly affected the regional pattern of co-operation–conflict. Specifically, this article studies South Africa and Angola's state-building process and foreign policy formation and execution from 1975 to 2015. The research concludes that these states produced co-operation or conflict as part of their balance of positions towards the systemic order, which is an interactional result of their state-building process (state capacity and state–society relations) and its impact on foreign policy's formation and execution (in-terests and security of the elites and foreign policy position and impetus towards the regional order). There is limited knowledge in Brazil and worldwide about how countries in Africa relate to each other, how their process of decision-making in foreign policy is characterised, and which constraints, processes and actors set foreign policy in the region's major pow-ers. For instance, it is widely known that between 1975 and 1988 Southern Africa was marked by high levels of systemic conflict involving direct and indirect armed conflict. This reality sharply contrasts with the co-operative environment that gradually formed af-ter 1989, which, in turn, still presents some difficulties in advancing into a full integrative project. Although this historical narrative is commonly known, there is lack of systemic comprehension of what factors could explain these great changes in the regional level of co-operation and conflict and why regional countries still lack deep regional integration. In this case, the globalist perspective usually adopted to explain Africa's international