While speaking at a Stanford Law School (SLS) event, the South African government’s chief negotiator on the settlement to end the country’s 46 years of apartheid emphasized the importance of establishing trust and employing inclusive negotiation tactics to resolve conflicts peacefully.
Roelf Meyer, who also served as the country’s former minister of defense, spoke at a Monday SLS event moderated by Allen Weiner J.D. ’89, senior law lecturer and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN).
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa was controlled by a white supremacist regime that enforced a system of institutionalized racial segregation known as “apartheid,” Afrikaans for “separateness.”
Prior to South Africa’s transition to majority democratic rule, Meyer served as Minister of Constitutional Affairs in the cabinet of former president F.W. de Klerk. After negotiating an end to apartheid with Cyril Ramaphosa, former Chief Negotiator for the African National Congress (ANC) and current president of South Africa, Meyer continued in his role as Minister of Constitutional Affairs in the cabinet of former President Nelson Mandela.
Now a retired politician, Meyer has served as an advisor in peace processes for conflicts in other regions across the globe, including Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, South Sudan and Myanmar. “[Conflict resolution] starts with talks about talks, then talks, then dialogue, and then negotiations,” he said, referencing common patterns in peace negotiations across borders.
“At SCIC, we often ask [conflicting] parties the question, are you able to envision a mutually bearable future?” Weiner said. “It doesn’t always involve a shared vision, but the idea is, if ‘you get what you want’ and ‘I get what I want,’ that would be tolerable.”
By the late 1980s, Meyer had aligned with Mandela and other ANC leaders, despite maintaining his affiliation with the National Party — the party responsible for imposing apartheid rule. The negotiations to dismantle apartheid evolved from disagreement between the ANC, which initially sought an immediate transfer of power and the implementation of a new constitution, and the National Party.
Meyer said that establishing a fundamental level of respect and mutual understanding with Ramaphosa played an integral role in South Africa’s transformation from apartheid to democracy. “We developed, first of all, a kind of curiosity about each other. I wanted to know more about him, and I guess he wanted to know more about me,” he said. “That level of trust that existed between us as individuals was extremely powerful.”
In addition, Meyer revealed that relying on internal negotiations, rather than bringing in external institutions like the United Nations, was crucial in the South African peace process. Meyer added that inclusivity was a defining feature of the peace negotiations that brought together over twenty political parties. “You negotiate with your enemies, and not with your friends,” Meyer said, in reference to one of Mandela’s famous statements.
The discussion later turned toward the role of history in conflict resolution and the tension between accountability and reconciliation in post-conflict societies.
Meyer underscored the importance of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a government-led initiative to redress human rights violations committed during the apartheid era, in developing new amnesty provisions and an interim constitution. The constitution provided a “historic bridge” between South Africa’s legacy of inequality and democratic aspirations during the country’s first non-racial general election.
“When I focus on conflict resolution, my view is that it is hard enough to resolve the future, so let’s not have the additional challenge of trying to resolve the past, because that’s contentious,” Weiner said. “Yet South Africa is extremely prominent for having established the TRC process as part of the transition.”
Although apartheid ended three decades ago, economic inequality persists in South Africa, particularly for its majority-Black population. Meyer attributed the inequality to ongoing discrimination in the implementation of Black Economic Development, a policy prescribed in the country’s constitution to broaden economic opportunity for Black citizens.
“Perhaps we should have asked the question, ‘How are we going to implement all these good intentions in the constitution?’” Meyer said, emphasizing the need to focus on profit-sharing rather than equity to establish enduring equality.
Ultimately, Meyer said, fostering trust and reconciliation across social and racial divisions is vital in effective conflict resolution. Meyer commended Mandela’s leadership in building such trust.
Mandela’s pioneering example of committed leadership is “absent” from many insurmountable conflicts across the world today, Meyer said. “We succeeded in involving a level of understanding and tradition of trust between a wide group of persuasions, Black and White across the nation, as a result of the leadership of President Mandela… [his precedent demonstrates] the process is equally important to the [resolution of] conflict.”
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