BDS Movement Research Paper

Section I: Introducing the BDS Movement in the United States

The past two centuries have witnessed the emergence and proliferation of domestic and international civil society actors—individuals, organizations, networks, movements, and campaigns—with strategic advocacy and social mobilization capabilities employed to achieve peace, justice, and equality both globally and domestically. Discontentment with the human rights, environmental, economic development, and racial and gender discrimination policies maintained by individual nation-states, businesses, corporations, and governing institutions served as the catalyst for domestic and global civil society actors to protest such policies, reshape them, and advance structural reforms that are

Peace Studies scholar Gene Sharp classifies the tactic of BDS as a method of nonviolent noncooperation that actively seeks the deliberate withdrawal of individual and institutional cooperation from the political, social, cultural, and economic activities pursued by the world’s governing institutions that contribute to violent conflict and perceived societal injustice. Sharp recognizes grassroots political, economic, and social boycotts as a form of nonviolent noncooperation. Peace studies scholar Maia Carter Hallward classifies the tactic of BDS as a method of nonviolent protest and persuasion, and as a method of nonviolent intervention. The former category involves largely symbolic activities and includes “public speeches, petitions, leafleting, picketing, displays of symbols, prayer services, vigils, marches, teach-ins, and walk-outs . . . .” The latter category is a more disruptive and invasive form of nonviolent action and involves acts of psychological intervention, civil disobedience, public strikes, and other activities deliberately undertaken to disrupt the normal operations of governing institutions, businesses, corporations, and other

The Montgomery bus boycott ended after the Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that racial segregation on Montgomery’s public bus transportation system was unconstitutional . In the 1960s, and in what became recognized as the most successful boycott campaign in United States history , a group of Latino-American and Filipino-American grape workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee organized a five year-long city-wide boycott of table and vineyard grape growers in Delano, California, in order to protest the pay and working conditions of California-based farm workers. The Delano grape boycott campaign was supported by the United Farm Workers Association, which actively expanded the Delano grape boycott campaign by coordinating grape boycott campaigns in states across the country and in Canada. The pressure created by the ongoing broad grape boycott campaigns eventually forced grape growers in Delano to enter into contractual agreements with the boycotting farm workers that provided them with significantly greater compensation, benefits, and