Having spent most of my intelligent life in a country riven by conflict, inequality and domination, I have no intention of trivializing the very serious nature of the problems we had to solve, and are still attempting to solve. This I would most certainly do were I to suggest that South Africa's successfully negotiated transition could be neatly, intellectually packaged and exported to other seemingly intractable conflict areas. It is customary for commentators to pay homage to the uniqueness of every situation, and then to subtly extract and sermonize to others about how it was done in situation x and why this should also be possible for situation y, if only this or that procedure or attitude was adopted. Let me state at the outset that, even with the benefit of three years of hindsight, there are still important aspects of our transition I do not understand, and have difficulty in accounting for. Therefore, if what I have to say is of any use to you, let it be on your conscience, for I do not know enough about your conflict to even judge whether you are doing the relevant thing by applying some of my insights to your situation.

At the outset, let me make it as clear as I can that I have no desire to indulge in metaphor, or conjure up some political alchemy, such as the ‘magic of trust’ or the ‘chemistry of negotiation partners’ to explain the crucial moment in the transition. Adversaries negotiate not because they trust one another; if they did, there would be no need for negotiating. To use trust as the key explanatory variable is to seriously beg the question. It seems to me that adversaries begin to negotiate if they jointly perceive their conflict to be unresolvable by any other means, and, perhaps more important, because if they don't negotiate, things can become very much worse before they ever get any better. If any major party to the conflict believes it can resolve the conflict at the expense of its opponents, or that it and its supporters can endure the consequences of not negotiating, the chances of compromise are negligible. A common perception of deadlock seems to be critical, and the first phase of negotiation seems to be taken up in exploring this deadlock and developing a common mental map.