Abstract
The perpetual search for solutions to societal conflicts, particularly those tagged intractable, that is, irresolvable, took a dramatic turn when South Africa, one of such age-long conflicts, bowed to mediation after about 48 years of fierce existence. Until now, no rigorously deep insight that is capable of accurately and adequately accounting for the dialectics of history that brought apartheid to such an abrupt end. South Africa became a new model of a democratic society in a transition that did not involve an external third-party and bloodshed. A rigorous study of the South African conflict, using critical discourse analysis and navigating through the political theory of nation-building, reveals that a set of theoretical paradoxes may have underlain the peace process as teased out in this paper. Key words: Apartheid, de-escalation, intractable conflict, transition, sustainability, deconstruction, societal peace.
Highlights
This article addresses the transition from Apartheid in South Africa and the puzzle of how it occurred relatively peacefully, given the intractable or seemingly insurmountable nature of the situation
What could guarantee peace interestingly is this state of imperfection called ―sacred?‖ We found equivalent ideas that brought about societal peace in Apartheid South Africa in this relationship between the ―perfect‖ idea and the ―imperfect‖ one (Oguntuwase, 2018:11)
Oguntuwase (2018) concludes that it is clear that the kind of peace originally desired in Apartheid South Africa was one that results from reconciliation
Summary
This article addresses the transition from Apartheid in South Africa and the puzzle of how it occurred relatively peacefully, given the intractable or seemingly insurmountable nature of the situation. The research is primarily pitched against finding lasting solutions to intractable conflicts, or better still, new approaches for de-escalating prolonged intractable societal conflicts such as the one in South Africa between 1947 and 1995 under the apartheid regime. In this case, about 48 years of deadlock was broken through some theoretically rigorous contraption that structurally brought an end to apartheid. There are no doubts that there were sufficient international pressures that did not mince words at emphasizing that apartheid was a philosophy that had gone out of fashion (Oguntuwase, 2018:245), yet there was no direct external participation in the mediation process. Politically speaking, apartheid may have ended substantially, but the gullies created by its erosion do not seem to have been filled with the passage of time, which again reaffirms the need for this research
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