The Historical Specificity of the Peace Process

Abstract

When trying to understand the peace process in Northern Ireland and South Africa it is tempting to emphasise exclusively the role of key people, as if they were special charismatic men and women without whom history would not exist. The peace process would thus become reduced to the effects of the biographical experiences and strategies of people like Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, John Hume, Gerry Adams, David Trimble and the rest. It is more common in the literature for developments in the political process, both nationally and internationally, to be used as the key factor, whether these developments are the move towards politics within former terrorist groups, the involvement of external governments as brokers, or shifts in voting patterns and preferences inside the two countries. Sociologists are inclined to stress exclusively structural factors, such as demographic changes, the emergence of new lines of differentiation and cleavage, and the effects locally of international economic restructuring, amongst others. However, the sociological imagination as Mills understood it requires all three to be considered in the one framework, along with historical factors, and as such it provides a rounded explanation of the peace process. We begin the explanatory process with this chapter.