ABSTRACT
The previous four chapters and the Introduction of this book examined and compared the politics, political platforms and roles of protest groups among the dominant communities in apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel, doing so through the theoretical framework of state-civil society relations. This framework differs from that used by the few previous studies which investigated processes of peace building or mobilization for peace in the two conflict areas. Here, the state-civil society framework provided the structure for studying the political systems that emerged and developed in both cases of settler societies, and for examining both civil societies and the relation between them. Through this, protest groups in the civil-society field could be located and studied, after which a detailed examination, using qualitative research and empirical data, could be made of the two sets of protest groups. In the process, it was also possible to locate the intermediate variables as a second dimension or level between the independent variable (political system) and the dependant variable (politics and roles of protest groups). Eventually, the influence of the intermediate variables could be inferred by determining variations in the outcomes of the two cases. As well as adopting a different theoretical framework, the study also developed a new classification for both sets of protest groups, by categorizing them according to their politics and political platforms, and in relation to the ideology in power. This classification was intended to tie in with answering the research question, since it would assist in understanding both the details of the political positions and, later, the variety of roles played by the different categories. In terms of analysing these roles, the study’s contribution is discussed at the end of this chapter. Chapter 5 clarifies the results of the whole book since it summarizes the work done in the four previous chapters and in the Introduction. In this way, the new insights added in each chapter while the study’s overall topic was being examined are accumulated and presented here in an organized manner. However, before the layout of this final chapter is described, it is important to restate the research question, research hypothesis and methodology used to examine it, as well as the findings arrived at in the individual chapters.
