Overview

From the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, Canadian policy-makers shared a remarkably similar world view that shaped their approach toward South African apartheid and the risks it posed to global race relations. Why did Ottawa take a leading role internationally in addressing an issue seemingly peripheral to its national interests? Canada, Apartheid, and the Defence of the Liberal Order draws on newly declassified files and an extensive program of interviews with policy-makers, officials, and activists in a definitive investigation of Canada's response to apartheid. Over nearly four decades, Canadian policy-makers and officials held consistently to the view that the West's association with Pretoria's organized racial oppression threatened to undermine the appeal of the liberal world order. In opposing apartheid, Canada was defending a global system predicated on norms, rules, and institutions in which Ottawa was ideologically invested. By unravelling the thread of racial perceptions woven through the liberal order, this thought-provoking study reveals Canada's liminal position in the apartheid story and global politics to be as much a social matter as a question of power dynamics.

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9780774871747

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Reviews

""Manulak's adroit use of extensive archival and documentary research, combined with a formidable array of personal interviews with key participants in both the policy process and the anti-apartheid movement, makes this a carefully balanced, rich, and engaging historical account.""-- ""David Black, Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University""

Author Information

Daniel Manulak is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Toronto and a former William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, the Canadian Historical Review, and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and he is a winner of the Canadian Historical Association's Political History Prize for Best Article (English Language). His popular writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, The Conversation, and Epicenter.

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