Functions and Failures of Transnational Activism: Discourses of Children's Resistance and Repression in Global Anti Apartheid Networks
Abstract:Throughout the later twentieth century, Britain's Anti Apartheid Movement (AAM) sat at the heart of a transnational advocacy network. From the mid 1980s, the increased repression of child and youth activists in South Africa became a particular topic of concern for the AAM, which launched a campaign to investigate and globally disseminate information about the brutality inflicted against black children. This network, in both its formal and informal forms, helped to garner essential international support for young activists detained by the apartheid regime. Yet, as children and youth's own stories were collected and rewritten for global audiences, they were abstracted from their political and cultural contexts, simplified into neat binaries of right and wrong, and framed according particular areas of moral global concern. While this strategy earned the AAM unprecedented media and governmental attention, it simultaneously denied children's resilience and political agency. This case study thus reveals the asymmetrical functioning of many transnational advocacy networks, which despite their good intentions, tend to privilege the connected over the disconnected. Exploring the AAM through a network approach reveals a web of connections among multiple individuals, groups and geographical sites, which complicate spatial conceptions of empire and postcolonial humanitarianism. Such an approach to global history exposes not just how metropole and periphery were mutually constituted, but also how they were misconstituted through uneven exchanges or overlooked connections.