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Under former President Mbeki, South Africa provoked international dismay and criticism when it tried to block United Nations censure of Burma, Sudan, and Zimbabwe for gross human rights abuses. In the case of Sudan, Pretoria stood accused of turning a blind eye to Khartoum's excessive and indiscriminate violence in Darfur, betraying South Africa's own struggle for democracy and commitment to promoting human rights. This article seeks to shed light on Pretoria's foreign policy by explaining its position on Darfur and exploring the relationship between ideas and interests in shaping the policy. I argue that the position on Darfur was not unfathomable or realist, as some observers claimed, but was based on the core ideas of South Africa's foreign policy: the African Renaissance; quiet diplomacy as the most effective means of dealing with pariah regimes; solidarity with African governments under pressure from the West; and an anti-imperialist paradigm that provided the lens through which the government viewed the global order, defined the country's interests, and conceptualized human rights. Whereas most studies of Pretoria's foreign conduct pay little heed to the policies of the ruling party, I show that the conduct flowed logically from the party's anti-imperialist ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prominent communicative approaches to humanitarian crisis assume that international action is constrained by definitional disagreement. Yet interpretive agreement is not always enough to stimulate states into acting. Reflexive discourse is an alternative form of communicative action, and it occurs when international actors (state, nonstate, or suprastate) generate insecurity in powerful states, and stimulate these states into actions that they might initially be reluctant to pursue. By calling out the discrepancy between a targeted state’s actions and its biographical narrative, reflexive discourse challenges a targeted state’s self-identity and thus illuminates the interest such a state has in confronting certain crises. I use the American response to the recent Asian Tsunami, reviewing how then U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland inadvertently used reflexive discourse by suggesting that Western nations were being “stingy” with their initial aid offers. This (in part) prompted the United States, albeit with much indignation, to increase by twenty times its aid to the affected areas. I then posit how a reflexive discourse strategy might have been used to persuade the United States into acting to confront the genocide in Darfur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of post-September 11 military operations in the context of the global fight against terrorism in general and the Iraq war in particular has overshadowed humanitarian interventions conducted by multilateral institutions. However, the threat posed by genocidal governments deserves the continuing attention of global governance because their draconian policies and mobilization capacities constitute the actual weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations. The tardy response of the international community to atrocities in Darfur has been widely regarded as a backlash of the emerging norm in international society which attributes a responsibility to protect civilians targeted by génocidaires. This article, however, will argue that the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and NATO have in fact devised and implemented two innovative peacekeeping strategies in Darfur that have set more optimistic precedents for humanitarian intervention, namely, a new division of labor between regional and international organizations and a pragmatic turn in peacekeeping. By dint of these new strategies, intervening organizations have an opportunity to counterbalance the deep-seated problems that routinely affect peacekeeping operations, namely, the body-bag syndrome and the rigidity of bureaucratic norms that regulate PKOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]