South African experiences with identity and community conflicts

This article compares and contrasts two conflict interventions conducted du ring the difficult and dangerous period of political transition in South Af rica in the early 1990s. Politicized ethnic violence was dividing black Afr ican communities, threatening the ongoing national negotiation process and the transition to democracy. In the Thokoza township east of Johannesburg, the structures and methods of the South African Peace Accord were unsuccess fully employed in an effort to prevent or mitigate ongoing violence. Ar the same time, in the Meadowlands section of Soweto, west of Johannesburg, a c ombination of processes grounded in alternative assumptions and methods all owed the community to take first responsibility for its own conflict handli ng and peacekeeping functions, ultimately transforming the local situation into a stable and nonviolent one. A case of using 'action research' as an a lternative strategy for engaging conflicted parries in dialogue and problem -solving, when they profess unwillingness to be involved in more explicit p eace processes, is described and explored. The article suggests, among othe r things, that in a situation of community conflict a labor mediation frame work which regards the parries to the conflict as necessarily adversarial, and intervener behavior that reinforces the perception of adversariality, i s not ideal for creating safe spaces for dialogue, or for allowing a sense of shared community identity to prevail over ethnic, political, or other di visive influences.