Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Political Science

Advisor

Peter Liberman

Committee Members

Michael O. Sharpe

Ming Xia

Subject Categories

Political Science

Keywords

Race matters in Foreign Policy Decision-Making, Protest Movement, Social Justice, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Activism

Abstract

U.S. domestic pressure groups have historically utilized the tactic of lobbying Congress as a tool to pressure the legislative body to make specific foreign policy decisions. My research findings suggest that over various periods of time, in total spanning approximately four decades, first heralded by African American human rights leaders and organizations, the actions of six separate domestic anti-apartheid economic sanctions and divestment organizations, influenced by episodic anti-apartheid protest actions in South Africa, used their varied American protest actions to remind and to admonish Congress that apartheid is synonymous with racism. Thus, apartheid had to be dismantled. An important number of congress members were particularly susceptible to anti-apartheid political pressure from key electoral demographics. Congress members, particularly those representing African American congressional districts and or districts with segments of white American electorates opposed to apartheid, were electorally conducive to anti-apartheid lobbying. Further, a significant number of congress members did not want to be publicly tarred with the racism stigma perceived as a societal shame. Accusations of congressional members support for apartheid “married” to racism could have the effect of swaying the outcome of elections in their respective electoral districts. U.S./South Africa foreign policy had become aligned over a period of time in the minds of some within the American electorate with the scourge of America’s racial history. Thus, the decades old foreign policy, rebranded by various American presidents but which continued strong economic and political ties with the minority apartheid regime was deemed unacceptable by U.S. anti-apartheid social justice proponents. They pressed for the “old” policy to be discarded and for a new policy of economic sanctions to be enacted in order to pressure the South African regime to abolish apartheid. Key among the domestic anti-apartheid actors in question were African American human rights/civil rights proponents who shepherded the anti-apartheid economic sanctions movement. In addition, there were also within the electorate white Americans, especially university students, influenced by an emerging racial justice value system and as such were moving away from long-standing segregationist racial belief system. Further, anti-apartheid actors through their organizations and otherwise, vocalized the immorality of the stain of American historical racism as a pressure mechanism to induce Congress to revamp the existing U.S./South Africa foreign policy. These U.S. anti-apartheid proponents were influenced by the actions of South African anti-apartheid resistance fighters during four seminal anti-apartheid historical periods: the 1952 Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws, the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, the 1976 Soweto Uprisings, and the 1984 Township Uprisings, and its corollary, “Wildcat” African Labor Strikes. These pioneering African anti-apartheid protests/uprising events were respectively in response to the apartheid government precursors: pass laws, Bantu Education policy, the establishment of a Tricameral Parliament and African township protests, including rent hikes, etc. Each seminal episodic event served unwittingly as antecedents, giving rise respectively to the U.S. anti-apartheid economic sanctions movement beginning in earnest in the early 1950s which continued to its1960s, 1970s and 1980s iteration and intensification. These combined anti-apartheid domestic organizations and allied efforts effectively over the span of time, with their racial justice underpinning, pressured the United States Congress to legislate a new United States/South African foreign policy in October of 1986. In the end, evidence supported by a number of factors discussed in this dissertation, including American polls taken during the period in question, suggests that the majority of U.S. congress members, both Democrats and Republicans, came to believe they had no choice but to legislate a new U.S./South Africa foreign policy to address the fervent demands of their racial justice anti-apartheid constituents.

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