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Liberation in One Organization: Apartheid, Nonviolence, and the Politics of the AFSC
Author(s) -
Hostetter David
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0130.00245
Subject(s) - politics , liberation movement , ideology , context (archaeology) , witness , sociology , white (mutation) , political science , political economy , gender studies , law , history , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , gene
The antiapartheid activism of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) employed active nonviolence within the context of an internationally supported liberation movement. As the struggle against the white racist regime in South Africa intensified, the strategies of the AFSC’s South Africa Program staff and South African Friends (Quakers) diverged. Because of the AFSC’s involvement in the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, its ideological emphasis shifted from relief work to pursuit of peaceful justice via action based on liberation pacifism in the 1970s and 1980s. The AFSC’s South Africa Program reflected this change. South African Friends and the AFSC staff clashed over differing definitions of nonviolence. Critics in the United States opposed the AFSC’s support for economic sanctions. The controversy around the AFSC’s South Africa Program emcompasses debates about race relations within an antiracist social movement, the relationship of first world pacifists to armed third world liberation movements, and the role of pacifist witness in a transnational liberation struggle.