South Africa is the most industrialized power in Africa. It was rated the continent's largest economy in 2016 and is the only African member of the G20. It is also the only strategic partner of the EU in Africa. Yet despite being so strategically and economically significant, there is little scholarship that focuses on South Africa as a regional hegemon.
This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of South Africa's post-Apartheid foreign policy. Over its 23 chapters - -and with contributions from established Africa, Western, Asian and American scholars, as well as diplomats and analysts - the book examines the current pattern of the country's foreign relations in impressive detail. The geographic and thematic coverage is extensive, including chapters on: the domestic imperatives of South Africa's foreign policy; peace-making; defence and security; bilateral relations in Southern, Central, West, Eastern and North Africa; bilateral relations with the US, China, Britain, France and Japan; the country's key external multilateral relations with the UN; the BRICS economic grouping; the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP); as well as the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
An essential resource for researchers, the book will be relevant to the fields of area studies, foreign policy, history, international relations, international law, security studies, political economy and development studies.

Adekeye Adebajo is Professor at the University of Johannesburg and Director of their Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation. He previously directed the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Cape Town from 2003 - 2016. Adebajo is a former Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford and former Director of the African Program at the International Peace Institute in New York. He has served on UN missions in South Africa, the Western Sahara and Iraq. He is the author of five books on African politics and multilateralism as well as numerous articles and edited collections.
Kudrat Virk is a consultant and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa. She was previously Senior Researcher at the CCR in Cape Town. Virk is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Peacebuilding in Africa and The ACP Group and the EU Development Partnership: Beyond the North-South Debate. She has published in various books and in the journals Global Responsibility to Protect and International Review of the Red Cross. She holds a PhD in international relations from the University of Oxford.