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legalistic approaches to international conflicts, such as the use of the WTO DisputeSettlement Mechanism, and the obstruction of the expansion of the UNSC’s remit,may be the recourse of the weak, but they still constitute means of surviving thevicissitudes of the international system.ConclusionEver since the rise to prominence of second-tier states in international multilateralnegotiations in trade, the environment, nuclear weapons and regarding humanitarianintervention in the 1990s, observers have been interested by the interplay of powerand principle in their stances. This dynamic has been affirmed by the allocation ofgreater levels of resources to international aid projects and multilateral peacekeepinginitiatives. While emerging powers such as Brazil and South Africa have enjoyedgrowth in the last two decades, they have only marginally improved on povertylevels at home, and meeting a myriad of social and economic needs. Much of thistension has taken place under the rule of governments of the Left, whose prioritiesmay have been expected to lie with domestic constituencies. Instead, many of thesenotions of justice, equality and poverty alleviation have been exported abroad inforeign policies that appear to expand the traditional ambit of developing states.Why has this been the case, and have ethics anything to do with Southerninternationalism?Born out of an enduring concern for the variation of states’ responses to similarinternational conditions, neoclassical realism provides an ideal theoreticalperspective from which to approach the trajectories of emerging powers.Neoclassical realism as a theoretical approach to foreign policy analysis is solidifyingits presence in the sub-field, but would benefit from being tested by application tosecond- and third-tier states. The three central contributions of neoclassical realismutilised in this thesis are: 1. The systemic dimension of foreign policymaking as akey factor; 2. The difference between national power resources and state power;and, 3. Unit-level intervening variables.101