In keeping with its foreign policy identity which promotes peace, security and development on the continent, South Africa has played an important peacemaking role in Africa. This softer approach to post conflict reconstruction has been informed by South Africa’s commitment to support peace and stability in states and shares an important link with its developmental agenda. Conflict severely hampers development in a broad sense and is a major threat to human security . This link between security and development informs South Africa’s peace building and peacemaking initiatives. South Africa’s African agenda, peace diplomacy and developmental partnership agenda are therefore extensively inter-connected principles of its post apartheid foreign policy. This policy brief commences with a brief overview of South Africa’s credentials as a continental peacemaker. The literature seeks to locate the proposed idea of a mediation unit in the context of South Africa’s development partnership agenda. It argues that trilateral development cooperation (TDC) has advantages for South Africa including an enhancement of its bridge-building role and buttressing its foreign policy priorities of mediation, developmental peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction and an African-centred diplomacy of development.
