The New South Institute (NSI) has published a new working paper under its South-South Dialogues programme, titled “Another World was Possible: Anti-Apartheid World-Making and the Unfinished Struggle for a New Global Order”. Authored by Elizabeth Soer, the paper revisits the South African anti-apartheid struggle through the lens of “world-making”, foregrounding the internationalist visions that shaped the movement and its understanding of liberation.

The paper argues that many anti-apartheid activists did not see freedom as limited to the end of apartheid or the achievement of formal political rights. Rather, they imagined South Africa’s liberation as inseparable from a broader transformation of the racialised, imperial and capitalist international order. Political freedom without global economic justice, the paper suggests, was understood by many activists as incomplete.

Drawing on extensive archival sources, the working paper traces these visions across multiple sites of solidarity and international engagement. It examines socialist internationalism and the role of the USSR and Cuba; Pan-Africanism and the relationship between anti-apartheid organisations and African states; the transnational influence of Black Consciousness and African American activism; Third World solidarity through the Non-Aligned Movement and the call for a New International Economic Order; and the role of the United Nations in internationalising the struggle against apartheid.

The paper shows that, despite ideological differences between organisations such as the ANC, SACP, PAC, BCM and UDF, many activists shared a conviction that South Africa’s struggle formed part of a wider project to remake the world. Anti-apartheid activism was therefore not only a national liberation struggle. It was also a South-South and internationalist project, tied to broader movements against colonialism, racism, imperialism and economic inequality.

At the same time, the paper reflects on the tensions and contradictions that followed South Africa’s democratic transition. It argues that the ANC government’s later turn to neoliberal economic policy limited the emancipatory and South-South solidarities that many anti-apartheid activists had imagined. In this sense, the paper uses the past not only to recover forgotten political horizons, but also to better understand the contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa’s role in the world.The full working paper is now available for download. We invite researchers, students, policymakers, practitioners and members of the public to read and engage with its findings. Recovering the global ambitions of the anti-apartheid struggle can help reopen important questions about solidarity, justice and the possibilities of progressive internationalism today.

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