‘The world is bigger than five’: Global swing states and the changing global order

Amidst escalating international tensions and the erosion of the post-1945 United States-led international order, global swing states are expected to play a key role in global governance. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the majority of these leading powers (India, Türkiye, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa) are increasingly opting not to align with either the Global West or the Global East. Adopting a strategy of independence, these states expect United States-Chinese rivalry to offer opportunities to enhance their own interests by ‘swinging’ their support. Although a shrewd response, the swing state strategy is not without complexity. This lecture reflects on the problems and possibilities associated with being a swing state, and the implications for South Africa specifically.

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Short biography

Janis van der Westhuizen is a professor of Political Science at Stellenbosch University (SU). He holds a BA (Law) and BAHons from the then Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg), an MA from SU, and a PhD from Dalhousie University in Canada. Upon his return from Canada, he taught at the then University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal) before being appointed as a senior lecturer at SU in 2002. He was promoted to associate professor in 2007, and to full professor in 2021.

The first twelve years of his research career focused on South African foreign policy, which saw him co-editing two books and numerous journal articles. Building on his interest in comparative politics developed during his PhD, he has been working on comparative foreign policy in the Global South since 2007. With a particular focus on comparisons between Brazil and South Africa, he examined topics such as development cooperation, the hosting of mega events as a means of status signalling, middle-power roles, as well as the emergence of Brazil and South Africa as authoritarian ‘developmental states’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

Prof Van der Westhuizen was awarded a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) prestige scholarship for doctoral study abroad (1995-1996), an Izaak Walton Killam doctoral fellowship (Dalhousie University, 1997-1999) and the SU Vice-Chancellor’s research excellence award (2005). He has also received research grants from the Open Society Foundation of South Africa as well as the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.

He has played an active part in a number of international research projects. These include the European Union (EU) Seventh Framework-funded project PRIMO (“Powers and Regions in a Multipolar Order”) (2013-2017) and a project to conceptualise the notion of ‘misplaced states’, funded by the University of Bath, United Kingdom (2016-2019). Under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, he is currently taking part in PRODIGEES (“Promoting Research on Digitalisation in Emerging Powers and Europe towards Sustainable Development”) (2020-2025).

His scholarly excellence has earned him visiting fellowships to the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA, 2011), the BRICS Policy Centre in Rio de Janeiro (2012) and the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP, 2020, 2024). In 2019, Professor Van der Westhuizen was also selected by Colorado State University to be the teaching professor of Politics for their Semester at Sea fall voyage (September to December). In addition, he has presented guest lectures in Milan (2010), Saint Petersburg (2015), Tokyo (2015), Rome (2023), Wroclaw (2024) and Coimbra (2024), among others.