ABSTRACT
South Africa’s conflict is not always considered, properly, a “civil war.” Because the resistance to apartheid was primarily a loosely organized, nearly spontaneous rebellion, scholars have generally not seen the conflict in classic government versus rebel terms, although clearly the African National Congress (ANC, a political party, or more accurately a social movement) and its military wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) were a classic African national liberation force; but the forces of MK and the government of South Africa never engaged in large, epic battles, at least not directly on South African soil. Nonetheless, with levels of fatality in political violence that tally at least to 24,000 from 1984 to 1998 (du Toit 2001: 34), the conflict deserves analysis from the perspective of war termination through a peace process. This is especially true given what some have described as a “miracle,” the successful reaching of comprehensive negotiated settlement in an essentially endogenous, or internal, peace process with considerable international intervention but very little direct, substantive mediation.1
