2 - The peace settlement

Summary

This chapter focuses on the warring actors' agendas, strategies, and resources through the phases of the settlement: negotiations, implementation, and the aftermath of the election. The key actors' agendas remained stable but their strategies and resources changed as their political environment shifted. Throughout the negotiations and implementation of the settlement, all the key domestic actors sought to maximize their power and formed and dissolved alliances expediently. During the settlement implementation, the warring parties (and the British) used the settlement as a valuable resource to attain their political agendas and abandoned alliances formed for negotiating purposes. Actors' compliance with and violation of provisions were part of their strategies to maximize power. During the implementation of the settlement it is possible to glimpse not only the leadership's interests but also rank-and-file guerrilla concerns with power, status, and privilege. After the election, the newly elected ruling party had to pursue its power-building objectives in the inauspicious political context created by the settlement. Confronted with three competing armies, white-controlled state institutions, and a white-owned private sector, the ruling party turned to the guerrillas and their war of liberation to build and legitimate power.

The chapter departs from studies of Lancaster House which seek to evaluate it in terms of externally imposed criteria and thus miss how domestic actors' interests and strategies played out during the different phases of the settlement.