Editors’ introduction

Abstract

The campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in support of the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation, discrimination, and dispossession is part of a long transnational history of boycotts as strategies of refusal. Its lineage stretches back centuries, and includes campaigns against transatlantic slavery, nineteenth-century working-class activism, and myriad interwar anticolonial projects. The movement against apartheid in South Africa is only the best known of its many recent antecedents. Boycott sometimes appears as an isolated consumer choice, but this appearance misleads. The power of boycotts is better indicated by the rage they invoke in their opponents. This rage itself is hardly new or unique to recent anti-BDS neo-McCarthyism. As a powerful model of active refusal, boycotts animate transnational networks of solidarity and allow the disenfranchised to challenge entrenched geopolitical categories of “here” and “there,” “us” and “them.”