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This article looks at the role that South Africa has played (or not) in promoting democracy in Zimbabwe and what implications this has for regional security. The paper argues that South Africa's foreign policy stance of 'quiet diplomacy' mirrors its old sec ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world?s only superpower, the US can force countries to follow its policies by the virtue of its raw power. Countries such as the UK and Canada, in contrast, must rely much more on their abilities to persuade others of the merits of their policies. For this reason, there are greater incentives for the UK and Canada to rely on ?soft power? in their foreign policies. Such soft power relies more on the ability of a nation to create followers through the power of its ideas ideals and less on its economic and military might. In short, image can be powerful force multiplier in contemporary world politics. To illustrate the growing importance of public diplomacy, this paper will compare the approaches of the UK and Canada in South Africa in the years immediately before the end of apartheid and in the decade after. These countries were chosen because they have both positioned South Africa as a priority country (emerging power) in their respective foreign policies due to its symbolism (as both the hope of Africa and the incubator of its ills), its role as the preeminent regional power, its growing economic clout and the cultural and linguistic affinities that Britain and Canada have with its people. In many ways, the struggle to dismantle apartheid was a quintessential public diplomacy project, as both countries sought to use public forms of pressure to force the South African government to create a more just society. The paper will first examine the public diplomacy strategies employed by Ottawa and London (independently and cooperatively) in the last years of apartheid and then it will examine how these public diplomacy strategies evolved in the following decade as the policy agenda shifted to economic renewal and development assistance. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: * Did Britain?s colonial history create a hindrance and was Canada?s lack of one an advantage in the respective pursuits of foreign policy goals?* Is there a happy medium between branding development projects and not mixing public affairs motives with assistance? * To what extent must official diplomacy be supplemented by a parallel people-to-people conversation through NGOs, diasporas, political parties and non-governmental avenues?* Were the British and Canadian public diplomacy approaches (both before and after the end of apartheid) focussed more on trust and mutuality or more on message delivery and advocacy? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to critically assess when and why preventive diplomacy succeeds and when it fails in an effort to develop a response-oriented framework that will address how the international response system can be redesigned so as to act quickly to prevent or limit the escalation of violent conflict. The pervasiveness of intra-state conflict has generated a number of studies on the causes of, consequences from, and strategies for managing intra-state conflict, and prescriptive essays on how third parties might successfully intervene to prevent the outbreak or escalation of violence (e.g. Jentleson 1998 and 2000; Lund 1996; Davies and Gurr 1998; Boutros-Ghali, 1992; Alker et al. 2001). Few studies, however, have systematically examined the conditions for successful preventive diplomacy. The present discussion will address these conditions in a manner that should: a) give a better understanding of when and why certain conflict prevention strategies succeed, and b) develop an integrated policy-operations framework that can be adapted to individual conflicts. I begin my analysis by defining the concept of preventive diplomacy in the post Cold War context; I then consider the relevant literature on intervention, and examine various types of preventive diplomacy with an emphasis on early warning systems. I next apply my analysis to a comparative study of conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa focusing on how preventive diplomacy failed to thwart bloodshed in the former two cases and succeeded in precluding the escalation of violence in the latter. I make causal inferences based on the case study evidence and posit that where conflict prevention worked, it was the result of informed analysis and understanding of the situation; where it failed, there was a lack of political will and an analytical framework. Based on this assessment, I conclude by proposing conditions that when present increase the likelihood of successful conflict prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]