Boycotts and Backlash: Canadian Opposition to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movements from South Africa to Israel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the struggle in Canada over international boycott campaigns, providing a comparative analysis of Canadian solidarity movements which deploy economic practices of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (known collectively as "BDS") to target the policies of foreign country, specifically focusing on campaigns against apartheid South Africa and contemporary Israel. In particular, this study looks closely at the organized backlash to these campaigns, including the role of domestic lobbies and state-led propaganda campaigns, in an attempt to explain why the boycott campaign against South Africa appeared to be so successful, while the campaign against Israel has struggled to become popular. This analysis relies on original archival research, as well as interviews with both supporters and opponents of these boycott movements. It also provides a new theorization of BDS in terms of its political economic character, exploring the limits and possibilities of these forms of activism, both in terms of material economic impact (as per Marx) and their role in ideological struggle (as per Gramsci and Hall). This study identifies a number of factors which distinguish the pro-South Africa and pro-Israel lobbies, which have affected the ability of each lobby to articulate to common sense and build popular and state support. While the pro-South Africa lobby ultimately failed to counter the anti-apartheid movement, Israel's support within Canadian society has allowed its defenders to go further and deploy coercive measures against boycott supporters, narrowing the space for pro-Palestinian solidarity activism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".