This carefully focused programme is aimed at enhancing an understanding of Africa’s development challenges, its prospects for renewal, and its international relations. Programme parameters include the governance agenda, including a focus on NEPAD and the African Union, strengthening domestic institutions and state capacities, poverty reduction, social issues such as HIV/AIDS, and trade relations.

Activities under this programme include round-table discussions and topical seminars, workshops, and conferences on key policy areas, and commissioned and published research. 

This programme is aimed at analysing multilateral institutions and processes as they influence the changing global order, with a view to understanding their impact on South Africa and the global South.

Project activities include commissioned and staff research, networking, workshops, and briefings. These activities focus on issues such as the reform of the United Nations Security Council; the politics and processes of global governance, including the reform of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO; the multilateral trade agenda; South–South co-operation; the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement, including trouble spots such as the Middle East; the socio-political impact of globalisation; and new security threats.

This programme is aimed at analysing and promoting an understanding of factors that advance or hinder regional co-operation, sustainable development, and security in southern Africa.

Project activities under this programme include workshops, networking, and commissioned and internal research on regional networks in southern Africa and other African regions, and on the conditions that would promote a developmental regionalism in southern Africa.

This programme has a broader strategic focus, and cuts across the other three. It is aimed at providing policy analysis and recommendations on South Africa’s foreign relations to the South African government, parliament, and civil society on the basis of key outcomes which flow from the African studies, multilateral affairs, and Southern Africa programmes.

Project activities under this programme include commissioned and internal research, workshops, briefings, conferences, and a visiting scholar and internship programme. Issues under investigation include South Africa’s relations with the European Union, international organisations, Africa, the United States, and selected countries from the global South, particularly those who are committed to improving South–South co-operation.