Apartheid: A Quest for Conceptual Clarity

• In Event: State Violence and State Repression

Abstract

In recent years the term apartheid has increasingly been used outside of its original South African context. In 2020, Human Rights Watch described the Myanmar government’s treatment of the Rohingya in Rakhine state as “amount[ing] to apartheid.” Between 2021-2022, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, labeled Israel’s system of domination over Palestinians as “apartheid” and wrote that it was committing the crime against humanity of apartheid. In March 2023 the UN Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan referred to the restrictions on women and girls in Afghanistan as “tantamount to gender apartheid.” What exactly is meant by the term apartheid? This paper examines this concept and evaluates the challenges and opportunities of using it in social science research. We trace its historical origins, legal genealogy, and assess areas of conceptual confusion including disparate definitions; ambiguous boundaries with proximate terms; and scope conditions of its usage. We evaluate the trade-offs of deploying the concept more broadly, beyond its strictly legal definition, discussing the possible universe of cases, the difficulties of anachronism for pre-1948 cases, sub-national dynamics, and the utility of “apartheid with adjectives.” The paper concludes with suggested ways forward with implications for the fields of human rights, ethnic conflict, and political violence.

Authors

• Oded Haklai, Queen's University

• Meghan Garrity, George Mason University