Cracks in the United States’ Overseas Empire: Threats to American Expatriates in Lebanon in the 1980s Sarah Snyder, American University
By the 1980s, American expatriate-founded institutions that had long brought low-cost benefits to the U.S. government in terms of expertise, entrée into a local society, and projection of soft power increasingly left Americans vulnerable to violence. In these years, for example, American University of Beirut leadership and faculty repeatedly faced death, kidnappings, and torture. My presentation will show how the kidnapping of Americans teaching in Lebanon signaled the decline of American power and empire as well as the ways in which the challenges the United States faced in protecting its citizens living overseas precipitated political and diplomatic crises for the Reagan administration.
People’s sanctions. U.S. non-state actors and financial markets in the anti-apartheid movement, 1977-1987 Flavia Canestrini, EUI
The presentation will discuss the economic practices of the Campaigns Against Bank Loans to South Africa and the one against Investments in the 1980s. Thanks to the growing market integration and financialization, financial interactions became in the 1980s a field of confrontation where private non-state actors, such as banks, could play a key, indeed decisive, role as enforcers of sanctions. The anti-apartheid movement learned about them and used this information to act locally through coordinated lobbying and local statutes, but with a global reach, becoming themselves foreign policymakers. In this new field, non-state actors redefined the liberal script of international diplomacy by showing how complex and potentially porous this new global economy could be. The Reagan administration’s attempt to oppose them proved the importance and the rising concerns of the Executive over the role that private actors or States and municipalities could play in the international arena, but also the limits the administration had in opposing such actions.