Essay-review on Robert B. Rakove, ‘Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Dr Rakove’s response to my review can be read here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/19474/discussions/42201/robert-b-rakoves-response-simon-stevenss-review-kennedy-johnson-and.

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 criti…[Read more]

Why did leaders of the Congress movement in South Africa abandon their exclusive reliance on non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid, form an armed unit (Umkhonto we Sizwe), and launch a campaign of spectacular sabotage bombings of symbols of apartheid in 1961? None of the earlier violent struggles from which Congress leaders drew…[Read more]

The Congress movement in South Africa was transformed in the early 1960s from a movement committed to the exclusive use of non-violent means in the struggle against apartheid to one focused on rural guerrilla warfare as a free-standing and sufficient first step towards ‘all-out war’ and the armed seizure of power. But few, if any, of the par…[Read more]