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The thesis has made a contribution to the International Relations literature on twoemerging powers of the developing world. By seeking to theorise the foreign policymotivations of two large developing states, an attempt has been made to broadenthe empirical reach of neoclassical realism, and to test its prescriptions with respectto politics in the periphery, thus bringing the periphery into the mainstream. Agencyin global politics exercised by developing countries needs to be taken into accountin analyses of contemporary international order, especially as developing countriesand developed countries seem to adopt divergent positions on the nature andnorms of this order.This study has contributed to a theoretical integration of the foreign policies andinternational trajectories of two emerging powers in the contemporary internationalcontext. Going beyond a comparison of two sets of foreign policy, the thesis haspresented a competition of theoretical perspectives to explain the behaviour ofintermediate states, and then settled on one perspective, neoclassical realism, tomake a contribution to the retrieval of IR theory for the analysis of peripheral statesand regions. Neoclassical realism has yet to be applied to the foreign policystrategies of any state in the Global South.Brazil, and to a much larger extent, South Africa, have been left behind by themainstream literature on emerging or intermediate states, and that oninternationalism as a foreign policy instrument. Hence, each candidate state for sucha study is typically analysed in isolation, in terms of its own foreign policyobjectives, strategies and obstacles. This leads to a myopic view of how such statesdevelop – and frame and re-frame their foreign policies – in response to systemicimperatives.The research objectives stated at the outset were to account for the extent to whichinternationalism, mediated through Leftist governing parties, conditions foreignpolicy responses in South Africa and Brazil. Hence, the key variables were theinternational distribution of power at any given stage (X 1 ), and domestic politicalstructures of each state (X 2 ), on the one hand, and the resulting form ofinternationalism on the other (Y).279