Violence or Peaceful Negotiation?
Young, Mark
Violence or Peaceful Negotiation? - 2008.
6
The release of Nelson Mandela from prison was remarkable mostly because of the nonevent it signified: the absence of a bloodbath that had been widely predicted for the country as the apartheid regime grew increasingly tense, cruel, and unsustainable. Four years after his release from prison and after a complex series of negotiations between Mandela and then-President F.W. de Klerk, South Africa staged its first one man-one vote election and again, peacefully, a new multiracial South Africa was born. How did this negotiation miracle happen? How were these two very different men, for decades implacable enemies, able to end the cycle of violence and find a negotiated solution? This paper makes use of a negotiation game commonly used in negotiation and mediation skills training to analyze the dynamics of this particularly important historical negotiation. Drawing on material from unpublished interview sources and biographical and historical texts, it seeks to shed new light on the question as to what turned the tide, and to explore transferable lessons learned from this experience for application to other difficult conflicts, in the political arena and elsewhere.
Violence or Peaceful Negotiation? - 2008.
6
The release of Nelson Mandela from prison was remarkable mostly because of the nonevent it signified: the absence of a bloodbath that had been widely predicted for the country as the apartheid regime grew increasingly tense, cruel, and unsustainable. Four years after his release from prison and after a complex series of negotiations between Mandela and then-President F.W. de Klerk, South Africa staged its first one man-one vote election and again, peacefully, a new multiracial South Africa was born. How did this negotiation miracle happen? How were these two very different men, for decades implacable enemies, able to end the cycle of violence and find a negotiated solution? This paper makes use of a negotiation game commonly used in negotiation and mediation skills training to analyze the dynamics of this particularly important historical negotiation. Drawing on material from unpublished interview sources and biographical and historical texts, it seeks to shed new light on the question as to what turned the tide, and to explore transferable lessons learned from this experience for application to other difficult conflicts, in the political arena and elsewhere.
Réseaux sociaux