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The Commission for Africa (CFA) and its report launched on 11 March 2005 has been described as a significant global development initiative and, from the British perspective, as one of the most complicated processes in public policy making seen in recent times. It sought to mobilize and reconfigure global power and in particular to shape global thinking and actions on development policy towards Africa. However, the CFA (and the G8 Gleneagles Summit, whose agenda it sought to influence) were silent on one of today's political, diplomatic and development challenges—Zimbabwe. Cynics would say that, if it could not handle this issue, it has nothing to offer on Africa. This paper argues that, despite this apparent silence on and marginalization of Zimbabwe, the CFA process was pregnant with issues Zimbabwean, and that it adopted and succeeded in using what one may call ‘President Mbeki's principle of silent diplomacy on Zimbabwe’, only to lose the plot at the last minute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuing crisis over Zimbabwe raises a variety of issues of considerable interest to both the theorist and the practitioner of foreign policy: the merits or otherwise of contemporary attempts at state classification; the utility and morality of intervention in a state's internal affairs by economic or military means; the notion of hegemony; the assumptions underpinning African diplomacy; the incentives and constraints attendant on South Africa's foreign policy. In attempting to explain South Africa's role in the Zimbabwean crisis this paper will—where appropriate—make reference to these theoretical concerns on the assumption that the interaction between South Africa and Zimbabwe provides some revealing insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]