Karen Smith

I currently teach in the MA International Relations programme in the Institute for History at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and am affiliated as an honorary research associate with the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, where I taught until 2017. Between 2000 and 2010, I taught at the Universities of Stellenbosch and the Western Cape. I serve on the editorial boards of, amongst others, Foreign Policy Analysis and Review of International Studies. In recent years, I have been a visiting scholar at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Vienna. My research focuses on South Africa’s foreign policy, the emerging powers, new global governance groupings like the BRICS, and non-western, particularly African, contributions to International Relations (theory). I am also interested in the issue of African agency in international relations more broadly, as well as the interaction between the emerging powers and African states.