The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid explores the foundations of apartheid political economy in South Africa, its development and the factors that promoted its collapse. The authors use rational-choice theory to reconceptualize the political economy of apartheid, arguing that apartheid was not an immutable, “irrational” form of racism, but rather a redistributive policy designed to benefit whites. In general, the authors contend, the ability of economic interest groups like white workers and capitalists to prevail on the state to meet their interests depended on certain characteristics, like size of organization, which affected their capacity to organize effectively. Lowenberg and Kaempfer further argue that international economic sanctions were of limited importance in ending apartheid: economic and political sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other advanced industrialized countries were supposedly ineffective in part because those sanctions appeared “to reflect the exigencies of interest group policies within the sanctioning countries . . . without regard to their target” (119–20).