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NEGOTIATION AND _____________ THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONFLICT1 I. William Zartman S,'outh Africa is undergoing a massive social and racial upheaval, and the whole world is waiting for the Great Indaba—the Zulu term for a large council—that will formalize the transfer of power from the white minority to the black majority. Yet, the formal restructuring of power through a grand national constitutional conference will come only at the end of a long process marked by myriad smaller negotiations at all levels. Thus, internal conflict management in South Africa demonstrates that prenegotiation and regime change both underlie and overshadow the formal negotiations in importance. This phenomenon has received some attention in South Africa, but has rarely been noted 1. The author is grateful to Timothy Monahan for his help in this research, to the MacArthur Foundation for its support, to the United States-South Africa Leadership Exchange Program (USSALEP) for its assistance, and to a large number ofcolleagues in South Africa for their aid in interviews and appointments. This study is part ofa larger project on Negotiations on Internal Conflicts (NICon) supported by the MacArthur Foundation. I. William Zartman is the Jacob Blaustein Professor of International Organization and Conflict Resolution and Director of African Studies at SAIS. His most recent book is Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford Press, 1989). He spent the summer of 1990 in South Africa doing research on a MacArthur Foundation grant. 113 114 SAISREVIEW outside.2 This is not to say that the Great Indaba will not be a necessary or even historic event, or that it has not already been an important subject of evolving consideration and debate in South African politics. The struggle about the meaning ofthe convention—by both the minority government and the excluded majority—is part of the internal conflict and will be examined later. It does mean, however, that a disorderly and uncontrolled assemblage of small negotiations, mixed with violence at the local level, is likely to continue until the old order is undermined. Only when existing laws and regulations are widely seen to be unenforceable and political authority has passed at least partially out of the hands of government can new solutions be confronted and the great convention be held to create a coherent new order. Because the negotiation process began only in the late 1980s and continues to develop in the 1990s, only the earliest stages are analyzed below. It is the speed of change and the flexibility of the government that will determine whether the mix of national and local negotiations will take a radical twist or a more moderate path to reform. As a result, the standard analyses of the way power is transferred must be augmented by the newer notions of prenegotiation3 and regime change.4 Prenegotiation can be defined as a loose set of activities and functions that must be accomplished before final negotiation can occur. Regime change describes the sequence through which relations pass in the transition from one regime to another. These two frameworks will be used here to analyze conflict resolution in the context of South Africa. Negotiation—The Idea and the Reality As might be expected, the idea that negotiation is the key to the resolution of South Africa's problems has risen and fallen with the 2.For examples in South African literature, see especially the works of Mark Swilling and Paul Hendler. In the West, see Roger Fisher, "Negotiating South Africa's Future," Negotiation Journal 3, no. 3 (July 1987): 231 and I. William Zartman, "Negotiations in South Africa," Washington Quarterly 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 141-158. 3.Janice Stein, ed., Getting to the Table (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Fanie Cloete, "A Hard Bargain: The Politics ofPrenegotiation," Indicators SA 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 7-10. 4.See Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Some Tentative Conclusions (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), and I. William Zartman, "Alternative Attempts at Crisis Management: Concepts and Process," in Gilbert Winham, ed., New Issues in International Crisis Management (Boulder: Westview, 1988). NEGOTIATION AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONFLICT 115 fortunes of constitutional reform. Negotiation has always...

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