The last year has given renewed attention to the strategy of boycott, as movements worldwide have embraced it as a tool of resistance against state violence, occupation, and settler colonialism. These calls build on a long history of boycott as a method of anticolonial struggle. From Palestine to South Africa, India, Ireland, and the United States, this panel explores how boycott strategies have functioned not merely as reactive tactics but as forms of strategic world-making that reconfigure economic, political, and social power. Foreground transnational histories of struggle that think relationally and comparatively across disparate sites, this panel will be of interest to historians of empire, labor, and social movements, as well as scholars working on Palestine, transnational activism, and global decolonization. The panelists examine the history of boycott in both relational and comparative terms, asking after the ways that differently situated social movements collaborated in boycott strategies while also exploring the lessons gleaned by reading across distinct boycott traditions.

Today, international calls for boycott are most prominently associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Palestine. Yet, as Abdel Razzaq Takriti shows, the contemporary BDS movement must be placed within a long history of Palestinian resistance. Takriti argues that while boycott once served as part of a broader revolutionary strategy, the tactic has shifted in the post-Oslo period into a mode of solidarity politics with implications for liberatory national strategy. Tithi Bhattacharya expands this analysis by situating boycotts within a broader transnational genealogy, mapping how boycotts have emerged at key moments of imperial crisis from Ireland to India to Palestine. While Bhattacharya emphasizes the relational links across these movements, Amanda Joyce Hall invites a comparative framework by turning to the role of Pan-Africanism in shaping the global boycott against apartheid South Africa. Studying the period of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, Hall demonstrates how early efforts to isolate South Africa—some implemented, others merely imagined—offered a blueprint for larger struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Such lessons traveled also to the United States, where Sam Klug examines the 1973 Arab-American-led wildcat strike against UAW investments in Israel. Regarding this as a critical yet underappreciated moment of social movement innovation, Klug thinks through the relationship between the “strike” and the “boycott” as labor activism shifted in the context of deindustrialization. Taken together, these papers illuminate the boycott not as a static tactic but as a dynamic political instrument continually reshaped by historical conditions. By tracing boycott’s shifting role as a revolutionary strategy and a solidarity tool, the panelists will reflect on the lessons that can be drawn from historical movements for anti-imperial and anti-racist justice.