The relative political power of the participants appears to have greatly influenced what they say to one another, and there is little substantive discussion of the consequences of alternative courses of action, or their relative advantages and disadvantages. For such a major decision, there is (at least in these documents) remarkably little debate or substantive analysis. For example, once Deng Xiaopeng, the most powerful participant in the discussions, had decided upon martial law, all but two of the other participants, the brave Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili, also supported it. The nature of this support appears to have mostly been political point-scoring and scape-goating, primarily directed against Zhao; in reading these transcripts, one has the impression that the speakers expressing such views were articulating positions they already knew Deng to support.

See: A. J. Nathan and P. Link, editors. “The Tiananmen Papers.” Little, Brown and Company, London, UK, 2001. Compiled by Zhang Liang, with an afterword by O. Schell.

Ca: MDC has publically assured the military leadership that they will not be prosecuted, and those that received land after the seizures of white-owned farms will be allowed to keep it. So I think you’re right that if there are negotiations going on, they’re likely including more parties than just Mugabe himself.

Timothy, this also describes very well ordinary social discourse with people in contemporary Shona culture. Of all the societies I have experienced (on all continents but South America), the maShona are the most adept at metaphoric and indirect speech, at speaking between the lines, at saying while not saying, at maintaining deniability, at secret signalling (sending contradictory messages to multiple audiences simultaneously), and at speaking truth to power while allowing the power to retain face.

I am saying that it’s actually hard to imagine or know certain things about those bound spaces where these conversations are happening. For example, as I said, how much Mugabe actually knows about anything is hard to judge. How much “Mugabe” is the man himself and how much he’s a fictional front for a group of elites is hard to know.

Historically, it seems to me, rural Shona elites have had a mode of political discourse that is very much about indirection, about telling silences, about open conspiracy. When I look at some very striking actions that I’m interested in my current manuscript about chiefs, I’m always struck at how dramatic, contradictory violence or action by powerful individuals seems to come from a miasmic haze of feinted intentions and indirect hints–and I’m convinced in many cases that there was no secret conversation where a deliberate, conscious, consultative decision to commit rational or programmatic action was taken, but neither were those actions wholly spontaneous, irrational or reactive.

I often lament how generalizability — in an extreme sense: not only across spaces, but also across times — has come to stand as the pre-eminent measure of worth for social science claims (well, probably all academic claims). It seems to be hard for many academics (and certainly policy makers) to accept the irreducible contingency of social processes over time, and that is why we’re better at explaining things after they’ve happened.

This of course doesn’t mean that post hoc analyses cannot offer anything to decisions about the future. But it does seem as if many want analysis to direct, specifically and non-negotiably, a course of action, rather than see it as an important guide to critical judgment.