Russia’s over a decade-long war against Ukraine, escalated in 2022, has expedited the convergence of kinetic and non-kinetic strategies, namely cyber operations, information and cognitive warfare and hybrid coercion globally. Accordingly, crises in the Global North and South are increasingly intertwined through shared technologies, information flows, and structural vulnerabilities, highlighting a new era of profoundly interconnected global insecurity.
This context underscores two key imperatives that warrant renewed focus. First, resilience, integral to NATO’s hybrid-threat doctrine and equally embedded in South Africa’s constitutional ethos, enabling states and societies to withstand shocks without being strategically compromised. Second, a comprehensive global, multilateral, non-geographically constrained approach to collective security responsibility, or a 360° lens, reflecting the repeatedly reiterated reality across international fora that resilience cannot be developed in isolation.
South Africa’s democratic openness, coupled with developmental ambition and diplomatic reach, creates opportunities while increasing susceptibility to foreign influence. Such vulnerabilities intersect with NATO’s concerns regarding the grey zone, where influence and coercion operate just below the threshold of war or crisis.
In circumstances of non-geographically restrictive multilateralism, a pragmatic approach to global security resilience is increasingly indispensable. Accordingly, this analysis argues for the selective adoption of NATO best practices to mitigate foreign influence risks while safeguarding sovereignty and non-alignment, thereby reducing broader systemic insecurity. An accompanying matrix delineates foreign influence exposure risks and selective NATO-tested resilience options.
Mapping foreign influence in South Africa
South Africa’s contemporary security landscape reflects three interlinked domains of foreign influence: the techno-structural, the hard-security, and the ideological-cognitive.
The techno-structural domain reveals vulnerabilities across energy, digital ecosystems, and critical infrastructure. Between 2024 and 2025, South Africa became Africa’s foremost importer of Chinese solar technology, with increased reliance on Chinese digital vendors across connectivity, mobility, and surveillance-integrated infrastructure solutions. Although the energy transition and digital integration are paramount to development, heightened supplier concentration creates single-vendor dependency. European investigations indicate that “over-the-air” update architectures can embed latent leverage risks, which NATO identifies as hybrid-threat risk vectors. Despite Pretoria’s recent diversification in civil-nuclear upgrades, sustained receptiveness to prospective nuclear bids from Russia and Iran may further entrench strategic exposure. Thus, risk mitigation necessitates diversification, vendor screening, and resilience frameworks aligned with NATO best practices to preserve policy autonomy and the interoperability of security partnerships.
The ideological-cognitive domain constitutes an increasingly salient vulnerability. Within this domain, foreign influence tends to follow a dual-track pattern: benign soft engagement gradually maturing into structural dependency and latent leverage over narratives, identity and strategic orientation. For instance, Moscow has seemingly intensified its outreach through media ecosystems, education and cultural exchanges, youth martial-arts-based and community initiatives featuring a revival of Soviet-era iconography, Orthodox Church networks, targeted immigration incentives, capitalising on liberation-era narratives. Beijing is deepening engagement through state-linked media, capacity-building, and elite-exchange mechanisms, with the progressive potential to gradually reinforce asymmetries and entrench structural imbalances. Tehran employs identity- and values-based outreach framed around shared grievances and solidarity, while its normative public policy, in principle, has the potential to, over time, consolidate into durable channels of foreign influence.
Notwithstanding the ubiquity of state-level soft-power engagement and allied forms of outreach, such practices simultaneously carry inherent hybrid risks that can recalibrate societal instincts, polarise discourse, and convert trust into latent leverage. What is frequently framed as pragmatic multilateralism subsequently yields limited short-term gains while gradually embedding asymmetric dependencies mistaken for partnerships. In this regard, a selective approach to NATO’s resilience toolkit offers South Africa a practical, operational fortification of sovereignty and democratic safeguards without compromising non-alignment or multilateral openness.
Kateryna Ryabchiy
Ms Ryabchiy is an international security and intelligence professional with a Master of Security Studies (with distinction) with operational exposure across the United States, Ukraine, South Africa, and Yemen. Holding a combination of field-tested judgement and refined analytical acumen in intelligence-led policy research.
