Despite employing a variety of strategies to maintain white supremacy, the South African government could not prevent the rise of a black resistance movement or of predominantly white nongovernmental organizations that opposed apartheid. Such challenges to apartheid, economic difficulties, international pressure, and behind-the-scenes negotiations led to regime change and democratic elections in 1994. In Northern Ireland, Catholic–Protestant antagonism has roots in many centuries of English colonialism, aggravated by mutual distrust and segregation, limited citizen control over government, intermittent economic stagnation, and sectarian prejudices, but only in the late 1960s did violence become a part of everyday life. Although bloodshed continued, progress toward a solution began in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. When Israel was founded in 1948, Arab–Jewish hostility already existed, and grew in the following decades, which saw five wars between Israel and Arab states, as well as political organizations, sometimes leading to violence, by Palestinian Arabs living. Domestic pressure for reform in the late 1970s and intense Palestinian resistance in the late 1980s forced Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, although prospects for peace remained bleak. All three conflicts shared features: disputes over land; forced settlements; ethnonational divisions; and the intersection of class and race.
Keywords: apartheid, Arab–Jewish, Catholic–Protestant, Israel, Northern Ireland, Palestine, shared features, South Africa