Harvard University Press Blog

The Islamic State and the Legacy of World War I

In A Land of Aching Hearts, new this month, Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University Leila Fawaz offers the personal stories of the Middle East’s civilians and soldiers in the First World War. What emerges is a picture of a region completely transformed, with consequences still shaping politics, conflicts, and lives across today’s world. Below, Fawaz relates the rise of the Islamic State to that century-old cataclysm and identifies the troublesome dynamics poised to outlast a strategy that aims to “degrade and destroy” only their most recent manifestation.

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The Islamic State aims to create a new Islamic Caliphate and restore Islam to its rightful place in world politics and human history by erasing the borders drawn after the First World War. It seems to be a product of the suspicion, suffering, and unfinished project of reconstruction that yet remains after the war tore the Middle East apart. In Europe, the wounds of World War I have healed. In America, World War I was not a disruptive experience for society so much as a brief first foray into the international politics of the Old World. But in the Middle East, the economic, social, and political wounds were deep and never truly healed. In short, the Great War devastated the Middle East. The Islamic State is an entity whose popular appeal and commitment to unspeakable violence feed on the memories and consequences of those societal war wounds.

Economically, the eastern Mediterranean on the eve of the war was a vibrant area of coastal trade and commerce. Increasing infrastructural development in communication and rail links began to integrate the coastal metropolises of rising wealth like Alexandretta, Beirut, Tripoli, and Latakia to the interior of Greater Syria with its agricultural commodities, especially silk and cotton but also grain, olives, and sesame seeds. Railroad construction in the early twentieth century leapt, connecting the Fertile Crescent to the rest of the Levant and beyond. In 1908, a railway linked the political city of Damascus to the religious hub of Medina. Factories sprouted across the urban landscapes. Crops entered global markets faster and in larger quantities than ever before. On the eve of war, Greater Syria, like much of the globalizing world economy, was growing at a healthy pace and was prospering.

Overreach in Iraq

With the eruption of an intense new period of sectarian violence in Iraq this month, the never-settled questions of American culpability for what’s happened and responsibility for what’s next have risen again to the fore. News analysis suggests that the American government was caught off guard by the surge from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, but hindsight holds that a descent to civil war was an entirely plausible consequence of American occupation. As we again debate the place of America in this raging conflict, political scientist Michael MacDonald suggests that the common explanations cited for America’s willingness to risk such consequences in our war to topple Saddam are exactly wrong. In the below excerpt from an uncorrected pre-publication draft of Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq, MacDonald details how America’s fallacious equation of its ideals with its interests—and global projection of each—led to this unleashing of chaos with no end in sight.

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Granting that the United States wanted regime change in Iraq, what possessed a generation of leaders to decide that going to war against Iraq was not only a good idea but a compelling one? Just because the war turned out badly for the United States obviously does not prove that it was a bad idea, but it does shift the burden of proof to hawks. The incentives of national security and neoliberal marketization might have been tempting, but the disincentives were stronger. War is costly, risky, and unpredictable, and electing war against Saddam made sense only on the assumptions that the United States would win, that the desserts of victory would justify the real costs and the opportunity costs of fighting a war in the midst of a region that was notoriously hostile to both American power and the liberal order, and that the new regime, which would accord with American interests and values, was achievable politically. The war, in other words, rested on profoundly ambitious assumptions about victory, the value of the stakes, and the prospects for transforming Iraq. Yet American leaders—and this is the pivotal point—scarcely registered the aggressiveness of their ambitions. If the United States was going to choose war in Iraq from all the possibilities that were open to the world’s sole superpower and the leading sponsor of neoliberalism, American leaders had to calculate that the rewards for going to war, after the costs were subtracted, were more enticing than alternate uses of American lives, money, and leadership. It is not obvious why they made that calculation.

The Bush administration is accused of using high-minded claptrap about freedom, democracy, and markets to sell the war, but the accusation gets the decision exactly wrong. The key to explaining the choice for regime change is that the Bush administration, and most American political and foreign policy elites too, subscribed to the shibboleths, euphemisms, and platitudes. They believed their fictions. The United States went to war because they saw liberalism as the answer to Iraq’s problems and because they expected that most Iraqis would understand that liberal values, which would fit naturally in Iraq, would emancipate them. If, however, these expectations turned out to be overly optimistic, then the United States was breaking the old order without a viable substitute at hand.

Does Malala Need Saving?

Earlier this month, New Atheist Sam Harris took to his blog to uphold the courageous Malala Yousafzai as both ally and object of his quest to save Muslims from Islam. Harris attempts to make of the internationally celebrated Pakistani activist an Islam-escapee in the mold of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, offering Malala’s work as the sort of truth-telling that “Islam’s apologists” must heed:

Malala is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. She is an extraordinarily brave and eloquent girl who is doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do—stand up to the misogyny of traditional Islam.

And yet, as Murtaza Hussain points out at Salon, Harris can’t possibly have respected Malala enough even to understand her own feelings on her culture and religion. Where Harris assumes Malala strives to be rescued from “traditional Islam,” Malala herself seems far more intent on rescuing Islam from groups like the Taliban, those whom Harris depicts as Islam’s most devout and representative.

Here’s Hussain:

Given her own words, Malala is ostensibly among the “Islam apologists” he is targeting; but this doesn’t come into play in Harris’ myopic worldview. Although Malala may claim to be a devout Muslim acting in accordance with Islam, this is merely an inconvenient detail that can be safely ignored… When you don’t even feel you have to listen to the voices of the people whose cause you’re championing, it’s a reasonable indication of the fact that this has less to do with them than with you.

Harris serves here as a particularly blatant example of a kind of crusading for Muslim women’s rights that anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod says became commonplace after 9/11. While Harris is fairly transparently using a young woman as a tool in his own ongoing war against Islam, the impulse noted by Abu-Lughod is just as likely to manifest as well-meaning—if ill-informed—concern expressed by ordinary Westerners for the status of women in the Arab world. For Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, it’s critical that we ask where that impulse comes from, and what work it’s doing in the world:

This book seeks answers to the questions that presented themselves to me with such force after September 11, 2001, when popular concern about Muslim women’s rights took off. I worry about the ways that representations of Muslim women’s suffering and arguments about their lack of rights have been working politically and practically. I follow the concept of “Muslim women’s rights” as it travels through debates and documents, organizes women’s organizations and activism, and mediates lives in refugee camps and the halls of the United Nations. I try to uncover what this framework that describes distant women’s lives only in terms of rights, present or absent, hides from us about both everyday violence and forms of love. I ask what evaluating lives in terms of rights does for (and against) different kinds of women. Along the way, I uncover how key symbols of Muslim women’s cultural alienness—from the veil to the honor crime—are deployed in twenty-first-century political projects, and why these symbols grip us.

Abu-Lughod traces these representations and arguments as they appear in venues as disparate as UN reports, New York Times opinion columns, book-length philosophical inquiries, and a genre of “pulp nonfiction” that seems to flourish in airport bookstores. Her argument is not that Muslim women are in fact carefree, but that their lives are as diverse and complicated as all lives are, and that when we make facile and unfounded judgments about culture’s role in those complications we forestall consideration of any actually effective strategies for playing an appropriate role in their alleviation.

Here’s more from Abu-Lughod:

 

Red Lines, Literal Minds

In his August 26th briefing on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry made clear the urgency and gravity with which the Obama administration is considering its response to what Western consensus deems to have been a chemical attack on civilians by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Though President Obama has since stated that a course of action has not yet been decided, Kerry all but swore to its imminence:

At President Obama’s direction, I’ve spent many hours over the last few days on the phone with foreign ministers and other leaders. The Administration is actively consulting with members of Congress and we will continue to have these conversations in the days ahead. President Obama has also been in close touch with the leaders of our key allies, and the President will be making an informed decision about how to respond to this indiscriminate use of chemical weapons. But make no mistake: President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious and nothing is receiving more serious scrutiny.

Kerry also spoke forcefully of the shock dealt to the “conscience of the world” by the attack in Syria, condemning such indiscriminate use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians as a “moral obscenity.” Reasonable people can and do disagree about the appropriate role of the United States in the world’s response to Assad, about the selectivity of American concern, about the propriety of elevating chemical weapons use above so much other atrocity, but there is little room to consider the attack anything but an act that “defies any code of morality,” as Kerry put it.

In the churning debates on American response there is constant reference to Obama’s August 2012 remarks on his “red line” in Syria. In a press release yesterday, for example, House Speaker John Boehner presented Obama with a series of trenchant questions regarding action on Syria. He began, though, by noting the situation’s implications for “America’s credibility across the globe,” before challenging the President to defend his “red line”:

Pakistan as a Political Idea

Today, August 14th, is celebrated annually as Pakistan’s Independence Day, commemorating the nation’s 1947 partition from India. We’re soon to publish Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, a work heralded as a “brilliant, counterintuitive meditation on the analogy between ideologies of Zionism and Pakistani/Muslim nationalism.” Below, Devji details that rarely acknowledged symmetry between the founding of Pakistan and Israel.

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“Pakistan is, like Israel, an ideological state. Take out the Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.”

By the time he uttered these words in a 1981 interview with The Economist magazine, Pakistan’s president Zia-ul-Haq was simply mouthing a stereotype. For Zionism had long provided a model for Muslims who sought to carve a new state out of India. Over the course of the nineteenth century, after all, European Jewry had come to represent the archetypical minority for states that were increasingly being defined as the property of their national majorities.

Pakistan’s founders routinely invoked the history of non-Muslim minorities, and particularly the Jews, rather than comparing themselves to other Muslim peoples. So in Pakistan and Muslim India, a pamphlet published in 1943 with a preface by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man who would become Pakistan’s father, we read that “if small peoples like the Protestant Irish in Ireland, the Christian Arabs in Syria and the Jews in Palestine do not wish to lose their separate political identity, and are supported in this desire for separate existence by two of the foremost democratic nations, there is no reason why Indian Muslims should be forced to accept the position of a minority.”

Given its identification with non-Muslim groups, Pakistan is in some ways not part of Islam’s modern history. Although it was the world’s first Islamic republic, then, Pakistan is also the only country to be created on the basis of Islam alone, just as Israel is the only state to be founded on that of Judaism. And in fact the similarities between these two otherwise very different and even opposed states are striking. Both were created as homelands for dispersed religious minorities; both were conceived by politicians and supported by populations from beyond their borders; and both emerged from bloody partitions supervised by Britain.

Indeed Pakistan’s creation in 1947 was cited as the legal precedent for Israel’s founding a year later. Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, Pakistan’s representative at the UN, tried to deny this similarity, pointing out that the majority of his country’s population was already Muslim before partition, and painting Jewish immigrants to Israel as foreigners. But the partition of India was a far more violent affair than that of Palestine, involving millions more dead and displaced; while Muslims emigrating to Pakistan often originated from much further distances than Middle Eastern Jews proceeding to Israel, and unlike the latter shared neither language nor culture with its existing inhabitants.

Human Rights as American Salve

Last month, Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic took David Bromwich to task for the latter’s front-page New York Review of Books article headlined “Stay Out of Syria!” Wieseltier, who has often written criticisms of the Obama administration’s response to Syria, hammered Bromwich for his “hysterical ratification of what is in fact the conventional wisdom” on the advisability of American intervention. As he sees it, that “conventional wisdom” of American liberalism is wholly determined by the country’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan:

All that matters to Bromwich about Syria is Iraq. I mean George W. Bush’s war there. Anybody who supported military action in Iraq must be wrong to support military action in Syria and anybody who opposed military action in Iraq must be right to oppose military action in Syria. History stopped in Baghdad. Atrocity after Bush gets an American pass. Pity the Syrians, who have the bad luck to be slaughtered post-Cheney. This analysis of the world, in other words, is not about the world. It is about us, and our a priori stain, and our quest for purity, which is grossly mistaken for conscience. We must not rescue, we must expiate. About the enormous strategic benefits of defeating Assad Bromwich has nothing to say; he is too exquisitely indignant, too ethically fastidious, for such considerations. So it is worth noting that this ethical fastidiousness, which is not his alone, is strikingly lacking in a particular moral vocabulary: The foreign policy discourse of American liberalism no longer includes an emphasis on freedom or democracy. It is saddened but not provoked by crimes against humanity. The satisfaction about quitting Iraq was undiversified by anxiety about the many reforms and reformers we were leaving behind, about the precariousness of the social and political progress that had been made. The relief at our withdrawal from Afghanistan is unaccompanied by regret for its consequences for the women of Afghanistan. What is the point of being a liberal if you are going to think like Rand Paul?

While it’d be ludicrous to claim that this last decade of war has no bearing on today’s foreign policy calculations, one would be hard pressed actually to argue that the most dominant concern for the leaders of the nation’s center-left has been an American cleansing. The parties responsible for spying on foreign citizens and diplomats alike have mostly thrown purity to the wind.

And yet, when one considers that the very concern for the well-being of citizens under Saddam Hussein that was used to justify preemptive war in Iraq in 2003 is what’s being deemed insufficient for Syrian intervention, Wieseltier’s take doesn’t lie too far off the arc scribed by the pendulum of American foreign policy sentiment. And what sent it swinging towards a concern for international human rights great enough to justify the last foreign occupations? In Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, Barbara Keys shows that it was the Vietnam War. At its core, she argues, the human rights revolution of the 1970s was an emotional response to the trauma of the war.

What is the Coup d'Etat?

In his foreword to 1979’s revised edition of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook, Walter Laqueur describes the work as “the brilliant and original book of a then very young man.” A clear factor in the immediate and wide attention paid to the book upon its original publication in 1967, Laqueur notes, was the paucity of previous work on coups d’etat, and Luttwak’s “shocking” assertion that they could be carried out with relative ease by small groups of men if they’d only mastered some “elementary lessons of modern politics.” While, as Laqueur explains, “whole libraries have been written on the objective conditions in which revolutions take place, about civil and peasant wars, about revolutionary and internal war, about guerrilla activities and terrorism,” the unpredictability of coups vexes political scientists as much as politicians. “But even if coups are unpredictable,” wrote Laqueur, “they contain certain ever recurring patterns—‘the same always different’—from the time the conspiracy is first hatched to the actual seizure of power.”

Ever since the Egyptian army seized power from Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, no observer can have missed the seemingly semantic debates over whether the move was accurately deemed a coup. While there are legislatorial reasons for the debate on word choice, with continued American financial support of the Egyptian army contingent on there being no coup, the use or rejection of the term carries obvious political freight as well.

Here Luttwak is particularly instructive. His “handbook” begins by setting out how the rise of the modern state—with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces—has enabled the coup d’etat by creating a clear distinction between the permanent machinery of the state and the political leadership, and by embedding power in a large organization with a structured hierarchy and definite chains of command. From there, he makes the obvious though important point that in a state with an established procedure for changing leadership, all methods other than that procedure “come within the range of illegality,” though our labels for them depend on the side we’re on.

The forms, as laid out by Luttwak (and with apologies for examples that show their age):

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

The Mighty, Majestic River of Persian Literature

We’ve just published Hamid Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism, and write today to share news of a discussion of the book taking place this very evening at the Asia Society in New York. The event, which features Dabashi in conversation with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History, will be streamed live at AsiaSociety.org beginning at 6:30pm ET, and viewers are encouraged to submit questions throughout the talk.

Dabashi’s book, one of the most ambitious on our docket this fall, presents an exploration of 1,400 years of Persian literature in order to reconceive the question of what it means to be human, which has so long been dominated by a Western perspective. He tracks the emergence and spread of Persian literary humanism (Adab) from Bengal to Istanbul, from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, always with present-day Iran as its epicenter. In his own rich prose, Dabashi gives us Persian literature as a river, “mighty and majestic,” the navigation of which demands “a fluidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly flaunts.” This river of Persian literature, he writes, is “flowing from an infinity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to-be-named sea.”

As Dabashi explains in the video below (after a long gaze on the book’s physical presentation), this is a story he’s always wanted to write:

We write the books we wish we had to read. This book, in particular, is in effect a love letter to the literary heritage that has made me—and millions of other people like me—possible. Possible, I say, in our language and diction, in the mode and abode of our being, but above all, in the cosmopolitan worldliness that is—and is made possible by—Persian literature. I have put everything I have in it. My defiance against European Orientalist traditions, against Iranian nativist historiography, and against North American comparative literary criticism, overcoming them all and thus reclaiming the magnificent worldliness of Persian literary humanism.

 

At the Asia Society’s website you can read an interview with Dabashi, and remember to tune in to AsiaSociety.org/Live this evening to join him and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet as they ride the river of Adab.

"The Most Crippling Sanctions in the History of Sanctions"

“Look, imagine had we let the Republican Congress work out the sanctions. You think there's any possibility the entire world would have joined us, Russia and China, all of our allies? These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period. Period.” That was Vice President Joe Biden’s response when Congressman Paul Ryan criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Iran during last week’s VP debate. From there the two men sparred over which party’s approach would more “peacefully” resolve the threat posed by Iranian nuclear efforts, apparently each taking for granted that the sanctions themselves are nonviolent.

If we take Biden at his word and accept that these sanctions are the strongest ever imposed, Americans should be neither encouraged nor permitted to imagine them as peaceful. Not after witnessing the U.S.-orchestrated sanctions on Iraq from 1990 until 2003, recognized as the most devastating in history, and now judged by some to have verged on genocidal. Joy Gordon presents that view in Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, a chilling study of how the U.S. steered the UN Security Council towards the creation and perpetuation of a sweeping humanitarian tragedy.

The following excerpt from Invisible War details how the world developed a sense of sanctions as innocuous, a view that encouraged complacency and indifference despite mounting evidence of the injustice of punishing a nation’s people for the transgressions of their leaders. The passage also presents then-Senator Biden arguing for continued reliance on the Iraq sanctions, in an exchange much like that of last week’s debate.

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The Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define genocide as including “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such . . . [by d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Some have argued that the U.S. role in shaping the sanctions on Iraq turned an act of international governance into a genocidal enterprise; that U.S. officials deliberately and knowingly brought about the indiscriminate destruction of life as well as destroying the means to sustain life in Iraq.

The possibility that economic sanctions could be a human rights violation, or even a form of genocide, was not something that anyone imagined when the sanctions were first imposed on Iraq in 1990. Sieges and blockades in time of war, such as the siege of Leningrad, caused terrible loss of life. But economic sanctions, as a form of political pressure outside the context of war, had not. If nations of comparable size imposed sanctions on each other, as was the case with the United States and the Soviet Union, then the impact was little more than symbolic. If the United States sanctioned a small nation, such as Cuba, then the targeted nation could shift its trade to the Soviet bloc. Consequently, economic sanctions during the Cold War were never devastating. In fact, they were viewed as a “middle route”: they were seen as nonviolent, in contrast to military intervention, but also as having more of a bite than diplomatic efforts. As of the late 1980s there was little concern about the ethics or humanitarian impact of sanctions. For the most part, those who wrote about sanctions were concerned with whether they were likely to succeed in getting the target state to change its policies, or with the difficulty of keeping sanctions in place when the members of an alliance were losing trade opportunities.

Not only were sanctions seen as innocuous, but the case of South Africa made them seem quite attractive. The Black South African population itself—the population most likely to be harmed by economic sanctions—called for sanctions against South Africa as an act of international solidarity. The sanctions imposed on South Africa were effective for a combination of reasons. They were accompanied by international diplomacy and social isolation of the apartheid regime within the international community. In addition to the international pressure, there was growing domestic opposition from labor, students, and political organizations, which emerged as forces within South Africa’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. One commentator noted that the “hurting stalemate” resulted in moderates from both sides negotiating with each other, and there were also reformist elites that emerged within the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. In any event, there was little ground to claim that the sanctions were hurting an innocent population against its will. In the end the apartheid regime gave way to democracy and sanctions were viewed as having an important and effective role in accomplishing this.

But the sanctions regime imposed on South Africa was anomalous in every regard: typically there is little support from the population that is harmed, and sanctions rarely induce the targeted state to change its practices. On the contrary, the more typical response is a “rally ’round the flag” effect in which the population supports the state in the face of what is seen as aggression by a foreign power. Furthermore, the most optimistic studies of sanctions in the twentieth century found that sanctions influence the target nation only about one-third of the time. Critics have argued that even this number includes cases that are overdetermined, and that if we look only at the number of cases where sanctions are clearly the determinative factor in changing a state’s policies, sanctions were clearly effective in only about 5 percent of the cases in the twentieth century.