The Contexts of Classification Matter

Margaret ThatcherUS President Ronald Reagan’s administration put Nelson Mandela (who died at 95 earlier this week) and the African National Congress (ANC) on a U.S.’s “terror watch list” in the 1980s.

President George W. Bush repealed the ANC’s terrorist designation — but only in 2008, a decade after Mandela had finished serving as President of South Africa (from 1994-1999) and two decades after the South African government itself had lifted the ban on the ANC.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described the ANC as a “typical terrorist organization” in the late 1980s. Continue reading “The Contexts of Classification Matter”