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A disguised surrender? South Africa's negotiated settlement and the politics of conflict resolution

Since the drafting of the interim constitution in November 1993, it has become the fashion to hail South Africa as an inspirational example to other societies divided along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. The conventional wisdom has held the South African settlement to be a model for conflict resolution as former enemies demonstrated a willingness to transcend the bitter enmities of the past in favour of a common shared future. The terms ‘miracle’ and ‘historic compromise’ have been routinely attached to South Africa's negotiated settlement, descriptions which imply that the contending parties eschewed a zero-sum game mentaliry in favour of a positive-sum approach rooted in the politics of inclusiveness and mutual accommodation. This article argues that this ‘peace without losers’ version of the South African transition is essentially a fiction, albeit a politically convenient one. What the South African transition actually produced was a comprehensive victory for a majoritarian political philosophy at the expense of group-based or consociational models, and thus for one particular political movement, namely the African National Congress, at the expense of the historically white-based parties, principally the National Parry Consequently although it may be an exaggeration to describe South Africa's transition as sui generis, this article concludes that South Africa's experience is certainly of limited relevance to the management and resolution of conflict in other deeply divided societies