Political leadership during a low-intensity conflict: the case of Conservative Party MPs Schalk Pienaar and Koos Botha in South Africa, 1990–1994

War and politics are closely connected in armed struggles for authority and legitimacy. At the end of the Cold War, the National Party (NP) white minority government in South Africa started negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC) and SA Communist Party (SACP) on a new political order. In May 1990, the Conservative Party (CP), the official opposition in Parliament, announced a ‘Third Freedom Struggle’ to prevent what it described as communist-dominated black majority rule over Afrikaners as a people. Its strategy eventually included electoral opposition, delegitimisation of the transition, and alliances with Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana homeland leaders. The CP caucus was divided on goals and means, but one parliamentarian, Schalk Pienaar, helped to build the extraparliamentary Farmers Crisis Action (BKA). Another parliamentarian, Koos Botha, played a leading part in a campaign of bomb attacks to strengthen the negotiation position of those who pursued an Afrikaner state. The paper analyzes and compares the previous experience, leadership roles, aims, methods, political entrepreneurship and shifting opportunity structures of Pienaar and Botha. The paper is based on primary and secondary sources, including interviews with Botha and Pienaar. It argues that both were forerunners in different extraparliamentary trajectories that helped build rebel groups.