Arms over AIDS in South Africa: Why the Boys Had to Have Their Toys

Abstract

This article attempts to find a rationale for South Africa's multi-billion-dollar arms deal given the absence of any conventional military threat and despite the overwhelming need to manage the HIV/AIDS pandemic as a far more salient threat to both South African and regional security. Culture, identity, and norms help to illustrate the compulsion to acquire weapons as a demonstration of a state's symbolic power, and as an important pursuit of foreign policy. In as much as Pretoria sought to gain status and prestige from the arms deal, the strategy is disappointingly conventional and therefore with limited ultimate effect.