Assistant Professor Vineet Thakur (Leiden University)

Professor Peter Vale (Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg)

This essay narrates the subjective process of the production of the expert. The ‘expert’ we focus on is the South African sociologist and liberal politician, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who engaged with the idea of negotiations in South Africa in both its theory and practice. The idea of negotiations in South Africa had emerged first in the struggles of black labour unions in the 1970s, and was nurtured in the 1980s within South Africa’s everyday politics. Slabbert’s initial understanding of the issue was mostly academic: this propelled him towards top-down solutions. However, in the 1980s, reflecting on the failures of his initiatives, he drew on the everyday, social politics of negotiations and advocated a bottom-up approach towards negotiations. In this essay we attempt to reclaim the subjective ‘author’ from the anonymous ‘expert’, mapping how Slabbert’s ideas changed over time, how he reflected on his own ‘expertise’ – its successes, disappointments and blowbacks – and in what manner these came to influence the development of conflict negotiation expertise in South Africa.