Abstract
This article examines the strategic decision-making of the South African regime between 1975 and 1989. Existing scholarship argues that Pretoria was a regional hegemon and that this position underwrote its security strategy. We suggest that scholars have overstated the implications of its regional strength. Using archival documents and interviews with retired military and political elites, we show how Pretoria’s threat perception, conventional military operations, and nuclear strategy were in fact conditioned by an awareness of the limits of its power within the global distribution of power; its isolation in the international system; and fears of conflict escalation vis-à-vis extra-regional threats.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 404-426 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Journal of Strategic Studies |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Ryan Brutger, Charles Glaser, Brendan Rittenhouse Green, Nuno Monteiro, Vipin Narang, members of the University of Toronto’s Comparative Politics and International Relations Workshop, participants at the 2019 University of Pennsylvania workshop on New Approaches to International Security and Cooperation, audiences at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and International Studies Association, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts and presentations of this paper. Special thanks to Anna-Mart van Wyk for her invaluable support during fieldwork for this project. All errors remain our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- South Africa
- conventional operations
- nuclear strategy
- regional power
- threat perception