The Advent of the Ex-Combatant: A Critical History of Reintegration

Abstract

Reintegration challenges tend to be presented as ‘new’, arising from what are said to be the unique destructiveness and barbarity of contemporary civil wars and from the uniquely inhospitable environment for reintegration after demobilization: the ‘lack of opportunities in weak states’. Yet most of the challenges identified in the previous chapter, from debates about community resentment to whether reintegration should be about ‘buying time’ or something more, can be traced back historically, and not just by decades but millennia. Challenges also tend to be located only in the post-conflict spaces of the global south; meanwhile, assistance programs for veterans in, e.g., the US and UK, are discursively walled off as irrelevant to and separate from ex-combatant reintegration, suggesting that programmatic lessons and progress come only from a study of like cases, which do not include examples from the north. Ex-combatants (including and perhaps especially in sub-Saharan African states) are held up as fundamentally distinct from veterans of wars fought by western powers. But recent challenges related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a look back at the history of providing assistance for fighters after war, suggest that the different worlds of reintegration after war are not as far removed as DDR discourse would imply.