Throughout the 1980s, the relationship between the African National Congress and the South African government was marked by mutual antagonism and distrust, but by 1993, former rivals Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk were embracing over a shared Nobel Peace Prize as South Africa prepared for its first fully democratic elections. The negotiations between Mandela and the South African leaders presiding over Apartheid are remarkable not only because they changed the social and political landscape of South Africa, but because they provide an example of peaceful diplomatic negotiation succeeding where violence seemed inevitable.

In the journal International Negotiation, Mark Young of Humboldt University of Berlin analyzed this “negotiation miracle” in terms of the “Red/Blue game,” a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma first conceived by the U.S. military during the Korean War which has become a classic exercise in negotiation training.

In the “Red/Blue” game, players are divided into two teams. The teams are sequestered in separate rooms and forbidden from communicating with each other. With the goal of accumulating as many points as possible, each team must select "Red" or "Blue":

Over ten rounds, [the teams] must each (independently) reach a decision to play a certain move or color: Red or Blue. Points are awarded to both teams at the end of each round depending on what they have both chosen to play… if both teams choose to play ‘Red,’ they each receive three points: if they both choose to play ‘Blue,’ they each lose three points. If the colors are different, the team choosing ‘Red’ loses six points, and the team choosing ‘Blue’ wins six points.

In other words, both teams know they would gain by choosing red, and that choosing blue, while offering the most potential gain, also carries a much greater risk.

From 1976 to 1989, in Young’s analysis, the relationship between the South African government and opposition parties like the ANC can be understood as a “Blue/Blue” game: “In separate bids to defy interdependence and to win the game on its own terms, each side sought to express and increase its power by means of threats intimidations and real damage inflicted on the other side.”