The discourses of the anti-apartheid sanctions movement in the United States, 1972-86

The passage of the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over the veto of President Ronald Reagan was a stunning victory for US campaigners opposed to apartheid in South Africa. Sanctions against the apartheid regime were first proposed in Congress in 1972 but struggled to build sufficient support beyond veterans of the US civil rights movement. This article argues that the discursive framing around the sanctions issue was important to its construction of a wider coalition of supporters in Congress. Both grassroots organizations and supporters in Congress moved away from a civil rights framing to an anti-communist framing, having briefly experimented with a human rights discourse championed by Jimmy Carter. This article is the first to use a word-scoring method to trace discourse systematically during the fourteen-year period when Congress debated the sanctions issue.