The Anti-Apartheid Movement: Pressure Group Politics, International Solidarity and Transnational Activism

Abstract

The Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) is popularly acknowledged as one of the more ‘successful’ late-twentieth-century social movements. Yet its significance is not located in the birth of a democratic South Africa, but in the various ways it embodied the shifting nature of political activism in Britain and the relationship between domestic and global political culture. The movement provides a useful link between ‘traditional’ political activism and more recent social movements: at its outset an offshoot of the anti-colonial establishment, with links to the successors of nineteenth-century humanitarian networks, it also became, through its particular repertoire of action, and as part of a global institution, an example of the new forms of social and political activism that have developed since the 1960s.