Stevens reviews Ryan Irwin’s ‘Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order’ (2012) and Rob Skinner’s ‘The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c. 1919–64’ (2010), two of the first published studies from an emerging stream of more detached and critical scholarship on the global anti-apartheid movement. The review essay addresses the questions of periodization, strategy, ideology, and the kinds of actors on which scholars focus, highlighting the ways in which these books advance the study of the external struggle against apartheid and the avenues for future research that they suggest.