South Africa’s Proxy War in Angola

Proxy War ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 157-181
Author(s):  
Tyrone L. Groh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
National Congress ◽  
High Degree

This chapter presents a case study for how South Africa used UNITA as a proxy to intervene in the tense civil war in Angola to protect itself from communist influence. Pretoria wanted to prevent the African National Congress from taking over South Africa by force and to minimize Soviet influence in the region. UNITA received relatively overt support, operated with a high degree of autonomy, and had highly divergent objectives. Although the international community rhetorically opposed South Africa’s involvement in Angola, the actions of the United States and Western Europe reflected a more tacit approval. Domestically, South Africa’s public was reluctantly supportive but only on the condition that the costs remain low. Considering that most states had already rhetorically condemned Pretoria’s government and its foreign policy in southern Africa, it is interesting that states failed to raise the international costs of South Africa’s indirect intervention in Angola.

scholarly journals Learning from Past Policy: Assessing United States Foreign Policy over Indonesia in Resolving the 1999 East Timor Crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Sigit S. Nugroho
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
East Timor ◽  
United States Foreign Policy ◽  
Case Study Analysis ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The U.S

Assessing the output of past foreign policy is instrumental for any country to learn policy-relevant insights, to appreciate its experience, and to improve its future conduct. To glean such insights, this article borrows Baldwin’s framework in assessing the success and failure in foreign policy. Using a case study analysis, it assesses the United States’ (U.S.) influence attempt towards Indonesia to resolve the 1999 East Timor humanitarian crisis. President Clinton’s decision to undergo an influence attempt primarily aimed to change Indonesia’s policy while gaining support from U.S. allies in the process. The article finds that Clinton’s decision was a highly successful attempt. This finding is based on several factors: (1) the attempt effectively attained the intended primary and secondary goals at a considerably high degree; (2) it was conducted at a considerably low cost for the U.S.; (3) it inflicted a high cost towards Indonesia; (4) the increase in Clinton’s stake strengthened the U.S. resolve to pursue the influence attempt; and (5) Clinton had successfully overcome the difficult undertaking as Indonesia possessed higher stake over East Timor. These findings provide some lessons for both U.S. and Indonesian foreign policymakers to chart future relations for the two nations.

Constructive Engagement: Reactionary Pragmatism at its Best

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Deborah Toler
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Willingness To Accept ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Constructive Engagement

No one is happy with the Reagan Administration’s southern Africa foreign policy strategy known as constructive engagement. Liberals object to the tilt towards South Africa, to the linkage of Cuban troop withdrawal from Angola to the Namibian negotiations; to the resulting moribund state of those negotiations; and to the deemphasis of human rights and development issues in favor of increased emphasis on military and security issues. Conservatives object to economic assistance packages for African socialist and self-styled states; to the declining U.S. support of Jonas Savimbi’s ostensibly pro-Western UNITA forces in Angola; to Administration efforts to improve relations between the United States and the Marxist states of Angola and Mozambique; and to the Administration’s apparent willingness to accept a SWAPO (i.e., communist guerrilla) outcome in Namibia.

16. Human Trafficking

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea M. Bertone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Global Issue ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines how the international community has defined and framed the issue of human trafficking over the last century, and how governments such as the United States have responded politically to the problem of human trafficking. Contemporary concerns about trafficking can be traced back to a late nineteenth-century movement in the United States and Western Europe against white slavery. White slavery, also known as the white slave trade, refers to the kidnapping and transport of Caucasian girls and women for the purposes of prostitution. The chapter first considers the definitions of human trafficking before discussing the anti-white slavery movement and the increase in international consciousness about the trafficking of women. It then traces the origins of the contemporary anti-human trafficking movement and analyses how trafficking emerged as a global issue in the 1990s. It also presents a case study on human trafficking in the United States.

India’s Proxy War in Sri Lanka

Proxy War ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 182-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone L. Groh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
The Government ◽  
War Policy

This chapter presents a case study for how India initially supported the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) covertly to protect ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka and then later had to overtly intervene to stop LTTE’s operations during efforts to broker peace. For the duration of the conflict, India’s support remained covert and plausibly deniable. Inside Sri Lanka, the character of the conflict was almost exclusively ethnic and involved the government in Colombo trying to prevent the emergence of an independent Tamil state. Internationally, the United States, the Soviet Union, and most other global powers, for the most part, remained sidelined. Domestically, India’s government had to balance its foreign policy with concerns about its sympathetic Tamil population and the threat of several different secessionist movements inside its own borders. The India-LTTE case reflects history’s most costly proxy war policy.

American Opposition to South African Apartheid

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Hostetter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
The United States ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Apartheid Regime

American activists who challenged South African apartheid during the Cold War era extended their opposition to racial discrimination in the United States into world politics. US antiapartheid organizations worked in solidarity with forces struggling against the racist regime in South Africa and played a significant role in the global antiapartheid movement. More than four decades of organizing preceded the legislative showdown of 1986, when a bipartisan coalition in Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto, to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Adoption of sanctions by the United States, along with transnational solidarity with the resistance to apartheid by South Africans, helped prompt the apartheid regime to relinquish power and allow the democratic elections that brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power in 1994. Drawing on the tactics, strategies and moral authority of the civil rights movement, antiapartheid campaigners mobilized public opinion while increasing African American influence in the formulation of US foreign policy. Long-lasting organizations such as the American Committee on Africa and TransAfrica called for boycotts and divestment while lobbying for economic sanctions. Utilizing tactics such as rallies, demonstrations, and nonviolent civil disobedience actions, antiapartheid activists made their voices heard on college campuses, corporate boardrooms, municipal and state governments, as well as the halls of Congress. Cultural expressions of criticism and resistance served to reinforce public sentiment against apartheid. Novels, plays, movies, and music provided a way for Americans to connect to the struggles of those suffering under apartheid. By extending the moral logic of the movement for African American civil rights, American anti-apartheid activists created a multicultural coalition that brought about institutional and governmental divestment from apartheid, prompted Congress to impose economic sanctions on South Africa, and increased the influence of African Americans regarding issues of race and American foreign policy.

Black Opera

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi André
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
William Bolcom

This is a book about thinking, interpreting, and writing about music in performance that incorporates how race, gender, sexuality, and nation help shape the analysis of opera today. Case-study operas are chosen within the diaspora of the United States and South Africa. Both countries had segregation policies that kept black performers and musicians out of opera. During the civil rights movement and after apartheid, black performers in both countries not only excelled in opera, they also began writing their own stories into the genre. Featured operas in this study span the Atlantic and bring together works performed in the West (the United States and Europe) and South Africa. Focal works are: From the Diary of Sally Hemings (William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton), Porgy and Bess, and Winnie: The Opera (Bongani Ndodana-Breen). A chapter is devoted to the nineteenth-century Carmens (novella by Mérimée and opera by Bizet) and black settings in the United States (Carmen Jones, Carmen: A Hip Hopera) and South Africa (U-Carmen eKhayelitsha). Woven within the discussions of specific works are three rubrics for how the text and music create the drama: Who is in the story? Who speaks? and Who is in the audience doing the interpreting? These questions, combined with a historical context that includes how a work also resonates in the present day, form the basis for an engaged musicological practice.

Conflict Resolution in Southern Africa: Why Namibia is not Another Zimbabwe

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 37-45
Author(s):  
David F. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
South African ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The U.S

Despite continued American insistence that a negotiating impasse had not been reached, by the final months of 1982 it seemed clear that internationally-recognized independence for Namibia would not soon be achieved. While Washington claimed that negotiations between South Africa, Angola, and the Southwest African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) (with the U.S. as mediator) remain meaningful, there appears to have been a decisive move away from settlement. The latest round of negotiations, spearheaded by the United States as the leading element of the Western Contact Group (the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Canada), has attempted to move South African-controlled Namibia to independence on the basis of Security Council Resolution 435 of September 1978.

Food Controversies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Bailey Norwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science And Policy ◽  
Food And Nutrition ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
Moral High Ground ◽  
Access To Food

As knowledge of agriculture, food, and nutrition grows by leaps and bounds, so do agricultural controversies. While the developing world fights over access to food, the United States and western Europe fight over the moral high ground in terms of food. This chapter seeks to explain the prevalence of agricultural controversies in the presence of growing scientific knowledge. It explains how controversies persist due to insufficient facts to resolve them, how a single controversy can be a proxy war over much bigger issues, the ease with which we conflate specific policies and social movements, the difficult task of debating science and policy simultaneously, and the myriad influences determining a person’s views.

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