The un-banning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 cleared the way for negotiations from which a new post-apartheid political order could emerge. But three years later, the main parties have made little progress towards a compromise, while violence has escalated in the townships. Marina Ottaway explains that the transition is likely to take an unprecendented form, influenced not only by internal forces, but also by the international climate of the 1990s - which, she contends, rejects apartheid but is unsympathetic to black demands for redistribution, and which has condemned the white government's vision of separate development but also accepts ethnic nationalism as inevitable. Ottaway also shows how South Africa stands at the confluence of a number of internal and extenal currents working against each other. The black-on-white conflict that has made the country a pariah in the past has evolved into a much more complex state of affairs.