South Africa is awash with policy failures, and policy confusion. We argue firstly, that our current discord over policy details has its origin in the (celebrated) negotiated transition. We hold that the vote count of an 85% majority in the Constituent Assembly in 1996 obscured the reality that the Constitution meant different things to different negotiators. The result was that South Africa, from the very start of the democratic era, lacked a national consensus on how to go about consolidating democracy. We keep on failing to build a proper roof over our democracy because the constitutional foundations are weak.
Nations as well as individuals are in many ways the sum of their memories, which are shaped by perception as much as by events. This collection of essays by South African academics looks at the ways the country is dealing with its past, a complex mixture of colonialism, slavery, apartheid,struggle, and guilt. The emphasis is on how that past is being perceived and moulded in the post-apartheid era.
South Africa has succeeded in establishing a democracy, but has yet to eliminate public violence from society. This book takes up the issue of post-settlement violence and ways of consolidating the newly found democratic peace. The role of negotiated institutions such as the new police force, economic factors relevant to the anticipated 'peace dividend', external factors such as arms smuggling networks, popular responses to rising threats to physical safety, and symbolic factors in enhancing the capacity of the state to deal with this issue are examined.
In the past two decades, peace negotiators around the world have increasingly accepted that granting amnesties for human rights violations is no longer an acceptable bargaining tool or incentive, even when the signing of a peace agreement is at stake. While many states that previously saw sweeping amnesties as integral to their peace processes now avoid amnesties for human rights violations, this anti-amnesty turn has been conspicuously absent in Asia. In Negotiating Peace: Amnesties, Justice and Human Rights Renée Jeffery examines why peace negotiators in Asia have resisted global anti-impunity measures more fervently and successfully than their counterparts around the world. Drawing on a new global dataset of 146 peace agreements (1980–2015) and with in-depth analysis of four key cases - Timor-Leste, Aceh Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines - Jeffery uncovers the legal, political, economic and cultural reasons for the persistent popularity of amnesties in Asian peace processes.
The art of negotiation—from one of the country’s most eminent practitioners and the Chair of the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. One of the country’s most eminent practitioners of the art and science of negotiation offers practical advice for the most challenging conflicts—when you are facing an adversary you don’t trust, who may harm you, or who you may even feel is evil. This lively, informative, emotionally compelling book identifies the tools one needs to make wise decisions about life’s most challenging conflicts.
Most discussions on negotiation use an exclusively at-the-table perspective, focused on tactics, persuasion, psychology and other 1-D elements of the negotiation process. Articulating a 3-D perspective, this book presents a practical approach by focusing on the surface process and also on the value to be unlocked with skillful deal-design.
As the threat of superpower confrontation diminishes in the post-cold war era, civil wars and their regional ramifications are emerging as the primary challenge to international peace and security. Notoriously difficult to resolve, these internal conflicts seem condemned to escalate with no end in sight. This book recognizes that internal dissidence is the legitimate result of the breakdown of normal politics and focuses on resolving conflict through negotiation rather than combat. Elusive Peace provides a revealing look at the nature of internal conflicts and explains why appropriate conditions for negotiation and useful solutions are so difficult to find. The authors offer a series of case studies of ongoing conflict in Angola, Mozambique, Eritrea, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Lebanon, Spain, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. They examine the characteristics of each confrontation, including past failed negotiations, and make suggestions for changes in negotiating strategies that could lead to a more successful outcome. The contributors, in addition to the editor, are Imtiaz Bokhari, Bilkent University, Ankara; Robert Clark, George Mason University; Marius Deeb and Marina Ottaway, Georgetown University; Mary Jane Deeb, American University; Francis Deng, Brookings; Daniel Druckman, National Academy of Sciences; Todd Eisenstadt, University of California, San Diego; Daniel Garcia, University of the Andes, Bogota; Justin Green, Villanova University; Carolyn Hartzell and Donald Rothchild, University of California, Davis; Ibrahim Msabaha, Center for Foreign Relations, Dar es-Salaam; and Howard Wriggins, Columbia University.
This book is the first and only practical guide to negotiating peace. In this ground-breaking book Sven Koopmans, who is both a peace negotiator and a scholar, discusses the practice, politics, and law of international mediation. With both depth and a light touch he explores successful as well as failed attempts to settle the wars of the world, building on decades of historical, political, and legal scholarship. Who can mediate between warring parties? How to build confidence between enemies? Who should take part in negotiations? How can a single diplomat manage the major powers? What issues to discuss first, what last? When to set a deadline? How to maintain confidentiality? How to draft an agreement, and what should be in it? How to ensure implementation? The book discusses the practical difficulties and dilemmas of negotiating agreements, as well as existing solutions and possible future approaches. It uses examples from around the world, with an emphasis on the conflicts of the last twenty-five years, but also of the previous two-and-a-half-thousand. Rather than looking only at either legal, political or organizational issues, Negotiating Peace discusses these interrelated dimensions in the way they are confronted in practice: as an integral whole. With one leading question: what can be done?
