This article evaluates the political impact of three non-official, track-two initiatives aimed at resolving the conflict in South Africa. Meetings between white South Africans and the African National Congress (ANC) in the pre-negotiation period from 1985 to 1990 produced direct, substantive inputs into official, track-one decisionmaking regarding negotiations, as well as indirect inputs into public opinion and party politics bearing on questions of negotiated settlement. Track-two talks are credited with changing the political risks and rewards of official talks by legitimizing the negotiation option and desensitizing each side's constituents to talks with the enemy, by building latent support for track-one negotiations, by furthering incentive-creating political polarization over the issue of negotiation, and by encouraging the formation of liberal, pro-negotiation political parties and NGOs. Track-two talks prepared each side for track-one negotiations by clarifying conflict goals and post-conflict policies; by exploring common ground; by developing cadres of officials with experience in dialogue, some of whom developed a bureaucratic stake in an official negotiation process; and by communicating preconditions for track-one talks. The ANC and government each sought to use track-two talks to divide and weaken the other. A sense of South African identity emerged during track-two dialogues which reduced threat perceptions among white participants who communicated with central decisionmakers, and helped create a sense of negotiation possibility complementary to decisionmakers' sense that negotiation was necessary.
Analyses of policymaking on national reconciliation tend to highlight situational factors, whereas studies of how national leaders' personal characteristics may have influenced such policies are rare. Using biographical data, this article compares Lincoln's reconciliation-oriented leadership in the Civil War and Mandela's in the South African conflict, and considers how their personalities affected their promotion of intergroup reconciliation. From the cases, it induces qualities of reconciliation-oriented leaders that may merit further comparative analysis. It finds commonalities in the two leaders' capacities for emotional self-control, empathy and cognitive complexity, optimism about others' potential for change, and in their intellectual and professional training that are related to their propensities toward reconciliation.Given the constraints imposed by the political environment, how might the personalities of individual leaders affect their decisions on war and peace? This article considers two outstanding examples of leaders who, during and after violent civil conflicts, oriented their policies toward national reconciliation. It asks how their individual personalities contributed to their policy choices.Regarding South Africa's transition to nonracial democracy, Nelson Mandela emphasized the collective contributions of the African National Congress (ANC), rather than his own role. However, Joe Slovo-the structurally oriented thinker and leader of the South African Communist
This article draws upon my experience using film and literature to
teach political science majors and non-majors about war. It assesses the
value of using films and literature to teach about war, offers organizing
themes and approaches to the material, and discusses ways to help students
develop their capacities to analyze the politics of war and of cultural
products concerning war.The author thanks
Joseph Yenerall for suggesting this article, and Judith Sanders, Lawrence
Lieberfeld, and the reviewers of PS for help in its
preparation.
This article examines two cases of intractable intergroup conflict in which a process of “semiofficial talks” led adversaries to direct, official negotiation. It adopts a typological approach to specify the variables—in terms of the status of participants in the talks, the status of the third party, the objectives of the intervention, and the form of dialogue— that distinguish semiofficial talks from other forms of diplomacy. It analyzes why adversary leaders sought negotiated settlements and draws on oral histories and narrative accounts from participants in two cases of semiofficial talks, as well as on documented minutes of the meetings themselves, to trace the causal pathways by which such talks contributed to conflict resolution. Analysis of semiofficial talks in South Africa and Israel/Palestine permits an inductive approach to theory building regarding the particular political circumstances in which this type of conflict resolution initiative may be effective.
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