Dr Simon Stevens

My research focuses on opposition to segregation and apartheid in South Africa, both from within South Africa itself, and in the United States, Britain, and the rest of the world.

My current book project, Laying Siege to South Africa, is an international history of the development and deployment of various kinds of boycotts and sanctions by the global anti-apartheid movement, from the early twentieth century until the 1970s. The project is based on research in more than 80 archival repositories in South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, the United States, Britain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

My manuscript-in-progress analyses how and why opponents of South Africa’s racial order chose to campaign for various kinds of boycotts and sanctions - including consumer boycotts, workers’ boycotts, sports and cultural boycotts, divestment and disinvestment, and governmental trade, financial, and diplomatic sanctions. The book explores what the consequences of those choices were, both for apartheid and the struggle against it, and for global politics. 

Stemming from a separate project, my most recent publications are a pair of articles that analyse the ‘turn to violence’ by the African National Congress and its allies in South Africa in the 1960s. The first article, published in Past & Present, analyses why that ‘turn’ initially took the form of non-lethal symbolic sabotage (primarily bombings of empty government buildings and other installations associated with the implementation of apartheid). The second article, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, analyses the process by which the Congress movement subsequently came to focus on rural guerrilla warfare as a free-standing and sufficient first step towards ‘all-out war’ and the armed seizure of power.