Norms and sanctions: lessons from the socialization of South Africa

Abstract

In response to South Africa's increasingly institutionalized racial discrimination during the postwar years, transnational anti-apartheid activists advocated a vast array of global sanctions. With the formal abolition of apartheid in 1991, sanctions advocates celebrated the apparent success of the international community's efforts in promoting a global norm of racial equality in South Africa. Since similar sanctions are an increasingly popular policy in the post-Cold War world, the South African case offers a useful starting-point for re-evaluating the utility of sanctions as a non-military policy. However, despite the prominent role of a norm of racial equality in anti-apartheid sanctions, both advocates and critics of international sanctions still generally ignore norms analytically. Expanding our conceptual framework beyond the realist assumptions implicit in most sanctions analyses enables us o t understand better why international actors adopt sanctions and how these measures affect target states.