Divestment Campaigns

Divestments, embargos, and other economical boycotting has been a way to pressure governments, industries, and companies to provoke change in policy. Specifically, Americans have used divestments in order to protest unsatisfying social policies in foreign governments. Economic boycotts have aimed to tackle South African apartheid policies in the 1980s, discrimination of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland, the age-old embargo against communist Cuba, and more recently American institutions have used disinvesting to send messages of disapproval of the conflicts in Sudan and Israel.

Disinvestment of South Africa is the most prominent and successful divestment campaign. Though divestment from South Africa was first advocated in the late 60s the campaign evolved on a larger scale in the mid-80s, achieving critical support by rallying college students on campuses across the country. According to Richard Knight, as of 1988 almost two hundred educational institutions had fully or partially disinvested in South Africa.

This wave of liquidating South African stock along with international sanctions effectively ended the apartheid system. However, John Silber former president of Boston University has openly criticized divestments specifically the campaigning against South Africa. Silber makes a valid point, by liquidating stocks institutions had the option of either selling these immoral stocks to some other institution or burn the stock, which doesn't affect the stock value because the stock has already been paid for.

Nonetheless, alumni of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania have organized The Swarthmore Campaign, the first divestment effort formed in response to the invasions of the Gaza strip in Israel. Alumnus Micah White of Adbusters Magazine says that the divestment campaigning organized at Swarthmore is different than other campaigns because it is ran by Swarthmore alumni giving them more influence, durable structure, and lessened susceptibility to administrative pressures.

Before the recent escalation of violence in The Nation cites that over forty universities, including Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, and Harvard had organized divestiture campaigns, focusing on disinvesting in companies that support Israeli military efforts. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who has been a frontrunner in organizing Israeli divestiture campaigns since 2002, compares the current status of Israel, The Gaza Strip, and The West End, to that of the township dwellings of South Africa during the apartheid regime. Tutu writes, "The United States has a distinct responsibility to intervene in atrocities committed by its client states, and since Israel is the single largest recipient of US arms and foreign aid, an end to the occupation should be a top concern of all Americans."

Many believe that "moral and financial pressures" like those that took down apartheid will definitely be just as effective in ending conflict in Israel. If enough institutions divest from these companies, share prices will drop, forcing companies to stop doing business in areas torn apart by conflict in order to protect their own interests. By doing so, they will deprive the government of the capital it vitally needs.

The International Herald Tribune, reported in May 2008 that there were financial statistics that proved disinvesting in companies with "links to regimes with questionable human rights" was not only a good ethical decision, but also a good financial decision. A study conducted by the Genocide Intervention Network and the Sudan Divestment Task Force evaluated annualized return on investments and found that the highest offenders of supporting Sudan underperformed their competitors and only continued to underperform while targeted by disinvestment

That is why divestiture campaigns have had such incredible successes. The more institutions that divest the more that will divest, thus either bankrupting or forcing companies to end their deadly affiliations and cutting off conflicting militia from funds they need to continue conflict. Peaceful financial protests like divestment pressures international companies and regimes by making them suffer significant financial repercussions.