Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Precolonialism: Nelson Mandela and the Law of the Law

Carrol Clarkson and Peter Fitzpatrick

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela expresses his admiration and respect for both the law and its judicial institution, even as the pervasive legal oppressions of apartheid are being brought to bear upon him. Derrida, in his essay, “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” asks whether the law that Mandela admires is “essentially a thing of the West.” He goes on to ask, “Does its formal universality retain some irreducible link with European history?” If this is the case, then the struggle against apartheid would amount to a “domestic war that the West carried on with itself, in its own name.”
But Mandela also expresses his admiration for the “structure and organization of early African societies” in a time “before the arrival of the white man.” In opposing the apartheid laws, Mandela has recourse to what Derrida variously terms a “superior law,” a “law beyond legality,” an “unfailing sentiment of justice,” “conscience,” a “law of laws” …
Yet these “superior laws” are not ideals detached from a contrary legal reality. They are qualities intrinsic to the being of law, to its integral extensiveness, enabling law to extend to a precolonial alterity - an alterity reducible neither to “the ethnographic present” nor to a pervasive occidental domination. Just what that alterity could be and just how it could be evoked by a condign law in South Africa are matters explored in this paper.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Analyses of policymaking on national reconciliation tend to highlight situational factors, while studies of how national leaders’ personal characteristics may have influenced such policies are rare. Using biographical data, the article compares Lincoln’s reconciliation oriented leadership in the Civil War and Mandela’s in the South African conflict, and considers how their personalities affected their promotion of intergroup reconciliation. From the cases, it induces qualities of reconciliation oriented leaders that may merit further comparative analysis. It finds commonalities in the two leaders’ capacities for emotional self-control, empathy and cognitive complexity, optimism about others’ potential for change, and in their intellectual and professional training that are related to their propensities toward reconciliation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper considers Nelson Mandela's contributions to the historic process of South Africa's democratic transition. It identifies distinctive aspects of Mandela's peacemaking practice, as well as aspects that may be common among accomplished peacemakers, and briefly discusses how Mandela's qualities might be fostered in prospective peacemakers. To analyze Mandela's personal attributes relevant to peacemaking and negotiation, the article adopts the categories used in the personality-at-a-distance (PAD) methodology, developed by Margaret Hermann and colleagues, which focus on politically relevant elements of personality related to leaders' motivations, beliefs, and cognitive and interpersonal orientations. Rather than quantitative content analysis, the study employs qualitative consideration of personality traits relevant to peacemaking. Since Mandela's personality eludes ready characterization in terms of high or low levels of a given trait and also comprises traits apparently in tension, the analysis offered here highlights tensions between ostensibly opposing characteristics, and the evolution of Mandela's personal characteristics over time. It concludes that Mandela's seemingly contradictory personality traits and high degree of cognitive complexity enabled him to fulfill the different roles of nationalist leader/competitive negotiator and of mediator/integrator, and equipped him, more so than other revolutionaries, for the transition to post-liberation leader.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The paper draws on Nelson Mandela's autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom" to understand Mandela's perception of the racial power conflict in South Africa, and his own role as a leader in attempting to resolve that conflict. Mandela consistently saw the South African conflict in variable-sum rather than zero-sum terms: it was in all sides' interest to avoid civil war, but without risk-taking acts of leadership civil war was the likely outcome.

The paper draws parallels between Mandela's leadership and the strategies for resolving variable sum (or mixed motive) conflict set forth in Thomas C. Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict." Mandela understood and practiced several of Schelling's strategic moves, including rendering oneself powerless to make further concessions and realizing when it is prudent not to push an opponent too far. But Mandela's accomplishments as political leader also highlight the limitations of Schelling's analysis, which minimizes the role of creative leadership in resolving conflict.

The paper then discusses Mandela's own leadership metaphors (herdsman leading a flock, chess player, gardener) and connects them to Mandela's unique ability, over the course of nearly four decades, to articulate for the widest possible audience the principles, methods, ultimate goals, and even the strategies of the anti-apartheid movement. Mandela's frankness about his reasons for turning to violent resistance in the early 1960s reflects paradoxically his own faith in the power of open dialogue about the nation's future.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and critical documents from Nelson Mandela’s Rivonia trial, the paper deploys historical comparison to assert that political good emerges from a relational racial consciousness.