Much of this scholarship has highlighted the incongruity of apartheid in the postwar world. In the age of African nationalism, decolonization, and agitation for civil rights, the white South African government’s determination to defend and extend apartheid became, for a growing number of nations and peoples, an increasingly intolerable anomaly. Of course South Africa was not the only place in the world where racial discrimination was openly practiced and South Africa’s whites were not the only ones to defend the indefensible. What was unique about South Africa was the widely shared perception that South African apartheid was not exclusively its citizens’ problem, but the world’s problem to solve through diplomacy, international legal action, or United Nations initiatives. It was not the only rogue state, but it was THE rogue state for most of the 20^th century, for a large part of the world.

This panel explores that phenomenon in new contexts. Saul DuBow’s presentation is a synoptic interpretation of US views and engagement in South Africa 1900-1965, arguing that the United States’ episodic engagement with South Africa often served to refract its own racial divisions while also opening opportunity to project American internationalism, knowledge, and anti-colonialism. Michelle Brattain’s presentation reexamines the failure of UN efforts in the 1950s through the South African domestic response, arguing that resolutions and investigations generated a rare unity between otherwise bitterly divided white South African political parties, broadening and hardening the South African commitment to apartheid. Ryan Irwin’s presentation uses apartheid as a site to explore the tension between liberal internationalism and anticolonialism in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on Richard Falk, one of the most important international legal theorists of his generation.