When the leaves are turning auburn, when the sun has begun its early evening retreat, and the air is singing in soft, frosty whispers, we know that autumn is upon us. For autumn enthusiasts, this season offers so much joy: cosy nights in, fall fashion, and famously, the pumpkin spice latte.
The pumpkin spice latte has long found itself in close correlation with Starbucks Coffee Company, the brand that has platformed this seasonal beverage into stardom. All things considered, this time of year is usually a lucrative one for Starbucks; however, the numbers are telling a vastly different story.
Starbucks faced an $11 billion drop in market value in April of this year, leading to a cut of nine hundred staff and some hundred locations in North America. This is in light of the mass boycott of the brand by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has targeted Starbucks for its affiliation with Israel following the events of October 7th, 2023.
Despite public insistence by Starbucks that the company does not have ties to Israel, the BDS movement has found evidence of its indirect enablement of Israeli war crimes. This includes the finding that two of Starbucks’ key shareholders simultaneously own investments in military companies that supply Israel with arms and weapons. These shareholders are the Vanguard Group and BlackRock, who hold a combined stake of 14.9 per cent of Starbucks’ shares.
Other central targets of the boycott list include McDonald’s, Disney, and Coca-Cola: all of which have financial ties to Israel, and hence are “complicit with Israeli atrocities”, as according to the BDS movement. The aim behind the act of boycotting is to leverage an oppressive system against the oppressors. Money is the oxygen of complicit corporations, and we, as consumers, hold the money. Therefore, logic suggests that we have the power to suffocate these corporations by boycotting them and denying them our business.
As national governments have continuously failed to fulfil their duties under the Genocide Convention, boycotting complicit corporations has been the most powerful method for ordinary people to challenge the system directly. Although the effects of boycotting are often slow to observe, with time and consistency, a significant impact can be made, as is evident from Starbucks’ recent announcement of widespread closures across North America. Outcomes such as this one are a testament to the capability of grassroots initiatives to enact real political change.
A look backwards in time tells the story of how boycotting has become such a cornerstone of peaceful political protest. It all began – perhaps surprisingly – very close to home.
The origins of boycotting lie here in Ireland, with the first ever boycott taking place in County Mayo in the year 1880. At that time, a feudal system of land ownership operated in Ireland, whereby English Lords would rent their land to Irish tenant farmers at extortionately high rates. The year 1879 saw the Land League establish itself to unite Irish people in their ambition to achieve the three F’s: free rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. The Land League was an institution that brought the oppressed together, allowing them to evolve in strength and courage as a collective.
Infamous for his frequent and merciless evictions, the affluent English land agent Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, whose legacy now stands unseverable from his name. Following his brutal mass eviction of eleven tenants, the Land League decided to take a stand. Charles Boycott found himself at the receiving end of an isolation campaign by his local community. The people of Ballinrobe, Mayo, denied him access to their shops and establishments, refused to labour on his land, and left him secluded from society and therefore incapable of maintaining his position of affluence in the area.
It was only a matter of months before Boycott fled back to England, disgraced and abashed, never to show his face on Irish soil again. This incident inspired similar protests throughout the rest of Ireland, and ultimately, throughout the world. Boycotting stands today as one of Ireland’s most successful tools in fighting English imperialism – demonstrating how non-violent acts of civil disobedience have the power to disturb ingrained hierarchies of oppression.
This concept of ‘the power of the people’ in challenging the status quo is prevalent throughout all of history. There have been a plethora of historically significant boycott movements, from the Persian Tobacco Protest of 1891, which challenged the monopoly on tobacco by the British in Iran, to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, in protest of racial segregation in the United States.
Perhaps most relevant to Irish history is the Anti-Apartheid Boycott of South Africa in the 1980s and 90s. With the aim of dismantling South Africa’s apartheid regime, a full-scale consumer, cultural and academic boycott of the country saw global mobilisation, and the people of Ireland were no exception.
Mary Manning, an employee of the Dunnes Stores supermarket on Henry Street, led a three-year strike against apartheid South Africa alongside ten other employees by refusing to handle the sale of grapefruit imported from the country. The strike began in 1984 and continued until April of 1987, once the Irish government finally banned the importation of goods from apartheid South Africa. This marked the first and only complete ban of South African products by a Western government.
Upon Nelson Mandela’s visit to Dublin in 1990 to receive the Freedom of the City of Dublin award, he met with the strikers and commented with admiration on how “ordinary people far away from the crucible of apartheid cared for our freedom”. The will of the strikers has evolved into a representation of what it means to be Irish and to be human. What began as a political statement ultimately diffused into the cultural sphere, with Irish musicians Christy Moore and Ewan McColl both writing songs about the strike, a plaque commemorating it being revealed on Henry Street in 2008, and a street in Johannesburg being named after the pioneer of the movement, Mary Manning.
Since October 7th, 2023, pro-Palestine advocates have drawn parallels between the apartheid regime of South Africa and the current zionist regime of Israel. Just as it was ordinary people who spearheaded Ireland’s boycott of South Africa, it is civilian-led movements in Ireland that have commanded Ireland’s impenetrable solidarity with Palestine, and which continue to pressurise the government to pass the Occupied Territories Bill to ban Israeli imports to Ireland.
As we exit our second autumn since October 7th, 2023, the boycott of Israeli goods and services continues. Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland Dr Jilan Wahba Abdalmajid has expressed her support and solidarity with the Irish BDS campaign, stating that “I don’t drink Starbucks and I don’t buy from McDonald’s”. Dr Abdalmajid believes that participation in the boycott movement against Israel is “a matter of morality” and that the success of the movement relies on the integrity of people’s individual conscience.
It seems that a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte is not to be mistaken for an innocuous autumnal treat.
