Nordic Solidarity with South Africa: A Danish Perspective

The Thinker

Sweden’s relations with the South African liberation movements date back to the 1960s, when the Swedish anti-apartheid movementarose. In addition to moral support and about $400 million dollars in financial support, Sweden became the first Western country to give official political support to the anti-apartheid movement. Such was the relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and Sweden, that the latter became the first country outside of Africa to be visited by Nelson Mandela in 1990, after his release from decades of imprisonment. The aim of this contribution is therefore to provide a brief synopsis of the rich history of Sweden’s solidaritywith the South African liberation struggle and the role played by the Swedish youth, the Swedish antiapartheid movement, civil society, trade unions, and Olof Palme, former Swedish prime minister, who was one of the most committed allies of the liberation movements.

Veftímaritið Stjórnmál og stjórnsýsla, 2016

The transnational anti-apartheid movement was heavily motivated by the postwar emphasis on human rights and decolonisation, and challenged by Cold War politics and economic interests. The aim of this article is to examine Iceland’s involvement in the anti-apartheid struggles with focus on the establishment of the unified anti-apartheid movement SAGA (Suður-Afríkusamtökin gegn apartheid), its organisation and activities. What were the motives of SAGA’s activists and their subjective experiences? The political background in Iceland is outlined as well as a historical overview of anti-apartheid activities including Iceland’s voting on resolutions against apartheid at UN and adoptions of sanctions against the South African regime. Iceland’s involvement in the antiapartheid struggle was contradictory. During two periods Iceland voted for more radical UN resolutions than did other Western countries, including the Nordic ones. Yet, Iceland adopted sanctions against the South African regime...

This paper examines the use by the Nordic countries of refugees as justification for involvement in Apartheid South Africa from 1984-1994.

2020

The global anti-apartheid movement mobilised millions of people who took part in boycotts and demonstrations. Despite the significance of the anti-apartheid movement, actual research on its nature as a transnational movement has been meagre. Most research on the anti-apartheid movement has focused on its national aspects, looking, for example, at the Australian, American, British or South African anti-apartheid movements. In this article, I argue that the most crucial aspect of this movement was its construction of transnational networks and forms of action. The central dimensions of the action forms and identification processes of the anti-apartheid struggle are analysed; historical continuities as well as discontinuities are investigated; and the movement is related to relevant political and historical contexts. The analysis is based on historical documents and interviews with 52 activists in four countries, and intends to make a contribution to the interrelated theoretical debates on (a) the relations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, and (b) transnational activist networks and social movements in a globalising world.

2000

My H-Net review article on Christopher Munthe Morgenstierne's book.

2006

This paper focuses on what from a global perspective must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era: the transnational anti-apartheid movement. This movement lasted for more than three decades, from late 1950s to 1994, had a presence on all continents, and can be seen to be part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. The paper argues that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politicsespecially in so far that movement organizations, action forms, and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in the contemporary context of the mobilization of a global civil society in relation to neoliberal globalization and supra-national political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.

7th Pan-European IR Conference SGIR, Stockholm, 9-11 September 2010

Moving the Social, 2017

This article examines the genesis and development of transnational anti-apartheid activism between the 1960s and the 1980s. Underpinning anti-apartheid was the fundamental principle of “solidarity”, an emotional and ideological connection between the self and a distant oppressed other. It was this concept that served to mediate the transnational dimension of anti-apartheid as a form of humanitarianism. Calls for sanctions against South Africa represented the movement’s most explicit engagement with political systems and structures, and thus the shifting power of humanitarian values in political discourse. Participation in boycotts represented a kind of activism from the ground up, in which individual economic decisions — the refusal to “buy apartheid” — became humanitarian acts. The notion of solidarity marked, moreover, a significant break with the paternalism of ”imperial” humanitarian efforts, while calls for sanctions and disinvestment promoted a global norm of racial equality a...