The paper contributes to literatures on settlements and institutional maintenance work. It does so by unpacking post-settlement legitimation efforts required to maintain contentious institutions between previously conflicting actors. Settlements often necessitate the maintenance of institutions from the past whose legitimacy is dubious for the new regime. We study the role played by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in re-legitimating and maintaining the institution of the armed forces in the transition from apartheid to democracy. Maintaining this legitimacy required collaboration between the incoming government as well as the apartheid era armed forces. We term these unexpected collaborative efforts “reluctant accommodation work”. Our findings show that the lines of allegiance may be more fluid than currently depicted in the literature. Actors that previously conflicted need to find an interest in collaborating in their efforts to shape central institutions. Second, we show that for settlements to shape the field, they need to agree on the terms of collaboration, what we term “passage points” as well as engage in public ceremonies to broadly legitimate the settlement and the institution it seeks to preserve.

该论文为有关定居点和机构维护工作的文献做出了贡献。它通过拆解解决争端后的合法性来做到这一点，以维持先前冲突的参与者之间有争议的制度。定居常常需要维持过去的机构，这些机构的合法性对于新政权而言是可疑的。我们研究了南非真相与和解委员会在从种族隔离制向民主制过渡中重新合法化和维持武装部队机构方面所发挥的作用。要保持这种合法性，就需要新任政府与种族隔离时代的武装部队之间进行合作。我们将这些意外的协作工作称为“勉强的适应性工作”。我们的发现表明，效忠路线可能比目前文献中描述的更为流畅。先前冲突的参与者需要在合作建立中央机构的过程中找到兴趣。其次，我们表明，要使定居点能够塑造这一领域，就需要就合作条件，我们所说的“通行点”达成共识，并参加公共仪式以使定居点及其寻求保护的机构广泛合法化。