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International relations are what a government does when nobody s looking. While this may well once have been true, the conduct of international relations in South Africa and elsewhere has come under increasing scrutiny by the public. This is partially the result of specialist expertise around the formal study of international relations and the making of foreign policy, enhanced by the development of International Relations as a separate academic field. Like the growth of institutes of international affairs (or the Council on Foreign Relations, in the case of America), the study of international relations commenced at the end of the First World War (1914 18) with the establishment at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, of the first academic chair in International Relations. It was called for Woodrow Wilson, America s twenty-eighth president, and funded by Welsh businessman and pacifist David Davis. In South Africa, the study of international relations commenced with the establishment of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), which met for the first time in the Senate Chamber of the University of Cape Town on 12 May 1934. Until then International Relations had been taught in various guises within History, Law, Economics and Politics courses, but it lacked a firm institutional base. In South Africa, International Relations was first taught as a separate academic discipline at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1963 although a professorship, called for Jan Smuts, was first filled in 1961. Long before this institutional setting, however, a more subversive and certainly more spicy variety of international relations understanding and critique was at work: this was, of course, the sharp eye on foreign policy and international relations, drawn in jest and sometimes in anger by cartoonists. Their interest in international relations predates the emergence of the powerful critical perspectives that have changed and almost redirected the field since