Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State

Challenges of Reintegration

J. McMullin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230290990
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312938
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a critical analysis of the reintegration challenges facing ex-combatants. Based on extensive field research, it includes detailed case studies of ex-combatant reintegration in Namibia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

1

Conceptualizing Reintegration Challenges

To introduce my approach to analyzing reintegration challenges in the case studies, I have divided this conceptual chapter into sections that explore the contradictions and disagreements embedded in current approaches to reintegration of ex-combatants, before moving on to a section that looks at each set of reintegration challenges – programmatic, security, political, structural, and ideational – in more detail.

Defining reintegration

Reintegration is a misleading term. The ‘re-’ suggests a return to civilian life, yet many combatants in modern civil wars have spent their entire adult lives (and sometimes their adolescent lives, too) in combat, knowing no other way of life, and possessing few skills aside from those acquired as soldiers.¹ In many pre-conflict societies, ‘non-integration’ is the norm, due to political marginalization, poverty, and repressive social systems designed to keep certain segments of the population powerless – especially the youth population, as was the experience of many young people recruited into the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.² The ‘re-’ may also intimate that the social and economic environment into which combatants return has not changed since they left, which is unlikely given the devastation of conflict and the way in which war re-shapes social, economic, and political landscapes.

Most definitions of reintegration focus on what is involved in the civilianization of demobilized soldiers.³ To understand reintegration as a process of civilianization, however, is not terribly helpful. Some ex-combatants retain access to arms and some are civilians who armed themselves initially in self-defense against government and rebel attacks; can they be considered ‘civilianized’? Ex-combatants that re-mobilize into the state’s new military or police (and thus are certainly not true civilians) also face an important transition so they, too, undergo a reintegration process into ‘normal peaceful life’.⁴ Analyzing their transition ought also to form part of any account of post-conflict reintegration. Additionally, the extent to which ex-combatants can be said to form a conceptually distinct group from ‘non-combatants’ is in doubt, given that the line separating the two groups has always blurred.⁵

With these caveats, I generally rely on the UN’s widely accepted definition from 2005:

Reintegration is the process by which ex-combatants acquire civilian status and gain sustainable employment and income. Reintegration is essentially a social and economic process with an open time frame, primarily taking place in communities at the local level. It is part of the general development of a country and a national responsibility, and often necessitates long term external assistance.⁶

External assistance takes the form of reintegration programs that provide transitional assistance in the form of cash, housing, land, food, clothing, medicine, vocational and agricultural training, job placement, and education in order to help ex-combatants sustain themselves economically and gain social and political acceptance. Programs comprise the activities believed to be necessary to achieve a ‘viable’ or ‘sustainable’ reintegration into post-war communities.⁷ A focus on sustainability is what is meant to distinguish reintegration efforts from emergency provision of assistance to ex-combatants in the immediate wake of conflict (called ‘reinsertion’ by the UN and in most DDR literature).⁸ This distinction separates a reintegration process from the constituent programs that, at their best, can facilitate (rather than impede) that process.⁹

Reintegration actors is the shorthand term I use for the many actors tasked to steward the reintegration process and therefore to manage the challenges that inhere within or result from that process. They include local actors, such as community leaders and the private sector of the state concerned; state actors of the post-conflict country, including relevant government departments, agencies, and national commissions for DDR; and international actors. International actors include the UN and its agencies: UNDP, UNICEF, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the DDR Section of DPKO. They also include the World Bank, the European Union (EU), international development and assistance organizations such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the IOM, state development agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and GTZ, and development aid donors and conflict mediators.¹⁰ Reintegration actors are purposive and goal-seeking actors that actively shape (rather than merely reflect) development and security policy in post-conflict states.

Reintegration also exists alongside other tasks and processes. Although some research into DDR is concerned with the sequencing of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, there is increasing awareness that each process often overlaps with, and can complement and complicate, the others. Furthermore, reintegration activities exist in parallel with numerous other peacebuilding tasks, where similar dynamics of complementarity and contradiction can be observed (especially with processes of transitional justice and security sector reform). Finally, ex-combatants are not the only beneficiary group in need of assistance after war: refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the non-combatant community in general also face tremendous hurdles integrating into post-conflict life.

Despite over two decades of international investment in, and experience with, DDR, reintegration remains a contested concept. There are no uniform standards to measure reintegration success in ex-combatant populations, nor is there consensus among reintegration actors about program objectives, components, or desirable outcomes.¹¹ Little is known about ex-combatants once programs end, as evaluations and program audits tend to be conducted in the immediate wake of program closing dates. Governments rarely gather follow-up data on where ex-combatants are living, how they are faring, or what they are doing.

Some actors think reintegration should aim to return ex-combatants to pre-conflict lives of poverty, which put them on par with the rest of the civilian population, but others believe reintegration should aim to create sustainable livelihoods for both ex-combatants and non-combatant community members, and worry that to simply return ex-combatants to their pre-conflict lives is to return them to the conditions that ignited war in the first place.

Another contradiction embedded within reintegration programming is the ambivalence or disdain that some practitioners seem to have for ex-combatants as program beneficiaries. Many interview respondents for this book were critical of the common model emphasizing ‘individualized’, targeted support for ex-combatants; they argued that this model precludes ‘community-based approaches’, a concern also reflected in most academic studies of reintegration.¹² The respondents asserted that communities were ‘more deserving’ of aid and assistance and that ex-combatants tend to receive more assistance than non-combatants during post-conflict transition, which they argue could fuel social tensions and resentment.¹³

Ex-combatants: Subjects or objects of reintegration?

Although this book uses the label ‘ex-combatant’ as shorthand, the term itself describes a heterogeneous collective of former fighters from very different contexts and who differ from one another in key respects as well, such as rank, type of military organization in which they fought, combat role, political ideology, age, gender, extent of post-war disability, ethnicity, and level of educational or professional attainment and experience.¹⁴ Literature and practice have coalesced around the conclusion that some ex-combatants are more ‘vulnerable’ than others (usually, these are females, children, and disabled combatants) and might require specially tailored assistance.¹⁵ Still, there is rich nuance inherent within each individual’s reintegration trajectory that is influenced by numerous variables wherein the extent to which that individual’s identity as an ex-combatant will be more or less salient.¹⁶ Reintegration is also simultaneously a social process (achieved via social interaction) and an individual one (achieved in relative isolation and different to the reintegration experience of other individuals and groups within any given context).

The category ‘ex-combatant’ is a social construct, with meaning distinct from the individual former fighters encapsulated within it. As such, analysis about the category necessarily entails ‘sorting out the structures of signification’ that produce the category, particularly because those structures tend to be presented not as constructions but as fixed and natural, as ‘background information before the thing itself is directly examined’.¹⁷ This means that the label is used not just as shorthand but also as an identity marker and, sometimes, an epithet. Reintegration actors draw on a repertoire of assumptions about ex-combatants that are themselves taken from a ‘whole body of wisdom, sayings, commonplaces … and unconscious principles’¹⁸ that determine which ex-combatants’ conduct and expectations are ‘reasonable’ and which are ‘unreasonable’. ‘Ex-combatant’ is also a strategic label, essentially contingent, available to ex-combatants themselves to use or discard depending on the context: they might adopt the label to apply for benefits or discard it to gain acceptance. Strategic calculations about what the label implies (especially, that ex-combatants are a potential threat to peace) might even structure ex-combatant dissatisfaction and protest in order to press the need for ongoing assistance.¹⁹ In this, ex-combatants are not unique: we all claim and resist various identities on offer in conscious and unconscious ways.²⁰

Although a principal lesson in the DDR literature is the importance of political, historical, and social context,²¹ generalized and universalized assumptions about ex-combatants continue to influence DDR program design and implementation. Reintegration challenges are exacerbated by the clumsy ways in which ex-combatants are constructed during DDR processes. Even though a critical literature has emerged that has reasserted the political and security motivations underpinning conflict mobilization, problematic assumptions about ex-combatants during and after demobilization persist. These assumptions reify stereotypes about ex-combatant behavior in ways that affect program duration, contours, and outcomes and imply that African ex-combatants are fundamentally distinct from western ‘veterans’.²² In the reintegration context, stereotypes about ex-combatants often mirror colonial stereotypes about the ‘Other’ as disorderly, violent, lazy, and licentious.²³ Consequently, the DDR process becomes an important site of ‘New Barbarism’, a term describing the tendency for external commentators and actors to depict violence in the global south as the byproduct of backward, inferior, uncivilized cultures.

Via DDR, modern perceptions about ‘African conflict’ (what it is, why it occurs, and what can be done about it) and ‘African fighters’ are produced and reproduced in ways that reinforce the idea of Africa as ‘the exotic other’.²⁴ Such ideas are not just to be found in journalism²⁵ or films²⁶ about African fighters, but are also embedded in DDR program frameworks and evaluations, and in policy and academic literature on DDR. During conflict, combatants are portrayed as acting out tribal, ethnic, and irrational animosity and barbarity; conflicts are apolitical, formless, and a ‘regression from civilized order’.²⁷ After conflict, ex-combatants are said to threaten the state due to primordial, underlying behavior patterns that make it natural, normal, and expected for them to turn to crime or violence. Crime and violence are even said to ‘give new justification’ to their post-conflict lives.²⁸ The IDDRS claim, ‘Idle former combatants are a real security threat’ and argue that the ex-combatant threat results ‘because of their lack of skills or assets, their tendency to rely on violence to get what they want, and their ignorance of or disrespect for local cultures, leaders and social habits’.²⁹

Stereotyping of ex-combatants occurs across the different phases and tasks of DDR. During disarmament and demobilization, the policy objective is to ‘break the chains of command’, meaning the minimization of interaction between ex-combatants and their former commanders, and the discouragement of political association and self-identification as ex-combatants. During reintegration, guidance centers on the need to avoid the perception that assistance is rewarding violent behavior during conflict.

Various literatures converge to script ideas about ex-combatants after war. Greed-based narratives hypothesize that natural resource predation will drive ex-combatants’ behavior after war, just as it is argued to have done during war, and will lead them to engage in banditry or criminality if their economic aspirations are unmet.³⁰ Literature on ‘new wars’ suggests that the ex-combatants of today are fundamentally distinct from the veterans of ‘old wars’.³¹ Studies on the regional dimensions of conflict suggest that ex-combatants are mercenary by nature and will migrate across state borders in search of new opportunities to make war. And, the discourse of ‘New Barbarism’, prevale...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reintegration into What?
• 1 Conceptualizing Reintegration Challenges
• 2 The Advent of the Ex-Combatant: A Critical History of Reintegration
• 3 Namibia: Jobs for Some
• 4 Mozambique: Cash for All
• 5 Sierra Leone: Trained for Jobs that Weren’t There
• 6 Liberia: Reintegration 2.0?
• Conclusion: ‘Like Everyone Else’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index