From Rejection to Acceptance: The Conditions of Regional Contestation and Followership to Post-Apartheid South Africa

The relations of post-apartheid South Africa with its neighboring states in Southern Africa have been marked by contestation and followership to the regional hegemon, shifting from the former to the latter at the beginning of this millennium. Analyzing the most important cases of regional security policy from the 1990s and 2000s, I show that four conditions explain whether the other regional states contest or follow South Africa: a demand for South African leadership, South Africa's general vision for distribution of power and guiding principles in international relations, the compatibility of policy-specific interests, and the interpretation of the past behavior of the hegemon.