Trends and developments in South African foreign policy : 2009

Broadly speaking, foreign policy analysts consider two contexts when studying a \ngiven state’s policy vis-à-vis the international environment: the systemic, which \npertains to the structural determinants of the external domain, and the domestic. \nPredominant attention to the former is associated with realist schools of thought, \nwhich start from the assumption that states, as unitary, rational actors, make and \nimplement foreign policy that is driven by national interests. On the other hand, \nemphasis on the domestic environment is the proclivity of liberal-pluralist foreign \npolicy analysts (and, it should be noted, theorists within the fast evolving new \nparadigm of constructivism, who also contend that ‘foreign policy behaviour is \noften determined primarily by domestic politics’).