Public and Private Sanctions Against South Africa

This article examines the role of nonstate actors in U.S. economic statecraft toward South Africa, both as constraints on state initiatives and as autonomous actors capable of directly influencing world politics. In so doing, it challenges one of the central premises of the dominant realist approach to international relations -that is, that states are the only significant actors in the global arena and that all other actors can only have significant influence through the intermediary of states.1 Part I calls into question a state-centered approach to the study of economic statecraft, first by exploring how the growth of the multinational corporation (MNC) has limited the ability of states to mobilize economic resources for political ends, and second, by examining how nongovernmental actors, such as the anti-apartheid movement, can provide an alternative sanctioning framework through circumventing states and directly pressuring the corporation. Part II demonstrates the degree to which the behavior of these nonstate actors had a significant impact on the economic viability of apartheid inde-