Apartheid

The term apartheid generally refers to a system of state-enforced racial or ethnic segregation. As a political system, apartheid was first developed by the South African state in 1948 to enforce physical and political separation among the country’s racial groups. In response to the South African government’s brutality in enforcing this system, apartheid was declared a crime against humanity in 1966 by the United Nations General Assembly. Although apartheid officially ended in South Africa in 1990, prior to the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994, the term is still used to describe state policy elsewhere in the world, most notably and controversially in contemporary Israel. As a result of its application outside the South African context, human rights proponents have increasingly used the term ...