Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground: Victims and Ex-Combatants (Law, Conflict and International Relations) (16 page)
Authors: Unknown
DDR programs have generally paid less attention to female combatants because they are seen as less of a security threat than male combatants.
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In addition, many female combatants, especially girl soldiers, self-demobilize to
avoid social stigma when they return or to avoid sexual violence in male-dominated demobilization camps.
Minimalist Versus Maximalist Approaches
There is an ongoing policy debate over whether DDR should focus on short-term security (the minimalist approach) or on long-term development (the maximalist approach).
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Until recently, most donors and practitioners shared a minimalist outlook: they treated DDR as a short-term technical exercise typified by counting weapons, establishing demobilization camps, and handing out reinsertion and reintegration packages—the “guns, camps, and cash” approach.
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The emphasis was on individual ex-combatants rather than on war-affected communities.
The UN committed itself to a maximalist approach in 2006. The Secretary-General stressed the “vital” need to coordinate DDR “with the wider peace, recovery, and development frameworks.”
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He proposed an “integrated” UN approach which would ensure that DDR be: (1) “people-centered” (through the promotion of international human rights and humanitarian law); (2) “flexible enough to provide ‘local solutions to local problems’”; and (3) nationally owned.
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That same year, the UN launched the Integrated DDR Standards, which sees DDR as “a complex process, with political, military, security, humanitarian and socio-economic dimensions.”
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The publication of the IDDRS did not resolve the policy debate between minimalists and maximalists. Instead, the integrated approach met with resistance inside the UN. “Integration inertia was provoked by challenges from above (e.g. normative disagreements and lack of higher-order political support) and from below (e.g. inter- and intra-agency tensions).”
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The piloting of integrated DDR in Haiti and Sudan ran into trouble as the security-oriented Department of Peace Keeping Operations clashed with the development-oriented UNDP and children’s charity, UNICEF.
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Scholar-practitioners joined the fray. Robert Muggah rightly observed that “DDR is becoming a kind of hamper into which many priorities—some of them not necessarily complementary—were added.”
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Kathleen Jennings was more critical, stating that DDR is “so broad in scope and aims as to undermine chances of effective implementation.”
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Indeed, integrated DDR is saddled with unrealizable goals.
Individual Versus Community Reintegration
The minimalist-maximalist debate has played out largely in the context of reintegration, with minimalists arguing for an individual focus and maximalists arguing for a community focus. The reason that the debate centered on reintegration is twofold. First, disarmament and demobilization phases were always the short-term, security-driven aspects of DDR. Second, reintegration was something of a blank slate as it had been largely neglected by DDR programming.
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Reintegration has economic, social, and political dimensions. First, it aims to create sustainable livelihoods for ex-combatants.
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Second, reintegration seeks to rebuild social capital and social cohesion.
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Finally, it offers ex-combatants an opportunity to resolve political grievances through legitimate channels rather than through force of arms.
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DDR programs generally put most of their efforts into economic reintegration (which is more easily measured). That strategy is based on two seemingly faulty assumptions. The first is that many combatants and armed groups are economically motivated, when, in fact, their motivations are “heterogenous and differentiated.”
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The second assumption is that social and political reintegration will follow from economic reintegration, whereas these different facets of reintegration appear to be independent of one another.
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The key debate in the reintegration literature (which parallels the larger security-versus-development debate) is whether reintegration should narrowly target ex-combatants or provide broader support to war-affected groups and communities. The IDDRS tries to have it both ways. The IDDRS justifies preferential treatment for ex-combatants in the short term:
Returning ex-combatants are potential “spoilers” of peace. This is why, while other war-affected groups, such as refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) may far outnumber them, ex-combatants will usually need focused, sustainable support if they are to succeed in making the transition from military to civilian life.
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Yet, as the IDDRS is quick to observe, this risks “turning [ex-combatants] into a privileged group within the community”
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—something that is clearly not conducive to their longer-term reintegration.
The IDDRS proposes a twofold solution to this thorny problem. First, reintegration assistance “must be harmonized with the assistance given to other returnees to minimize competition and resentment.”
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Second, direct assistance to ex-combatants should be phased out over time and replaced with community-based reintegration (what the IDDRS equates with “sustainable reintegration”).
There is a real danger, however, that DDR programs that pay increased attention to other returnees and communities run the risk of losing their focus, as well as the trust of ex-combatants. In addition, such programs can create confusion among beneficiaries—as happened with a DDR program in the Democratic Republic of Congo that provided short-term micro-finance to former combatants and medium-term grants to communities.
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Furthermore, there is very little experience of DDR programs focusing on both combatants and communities.
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To resolve the tensions between the minimalist and maximalist conceptions of DDR, some scholars and practitioners have proposed “de-linking reintegration from DDR.”
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For example, James Pugel argues:
One way of reducing the scope of DDR as currently conceived is by substituting “reintegration” with “reinsertion” in order to focus the programmes
away from long-term and open-ended commitments to short-term and fixed objectives. Reintegration could then emerge as a more deliberate intervention tool, or be superseded by mainstream development programmes entirely.
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In fact, it would make more sense if long-term reintegration, focused on both ex-combatants and their receiving communities, was handled by development actors rather than DDR. This approach is recommended by the World Bank in the final report on its seven-year and US$500 million DDR program in the Great Lakes region.
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Factors Contributing to Reintegration
The debate over individual versus community reintegration is stymied by a weak evidence base. There has been surprisingly little empirical research on reintegration.
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The IDDRS recognizes that DDR programs have focused on short-term, quantitative outcomes rather than longer-term, qualitative impacts.
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Anders Nilsson goes further: he bluntly criticizes reintegration as “a theoryless field” of untested assumptions, descriptive case studies, and lessons learned.
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Still, it is worth looking at what is currently known about three factors thought to influence reintegration: participation in DDR programs, payments to ex-combatants, and combatants’ wartime roles.
So far, there is little evidence that DDR programs actually promote successful reintegration.
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Based on surveys with over 1,000 ex-combatants in Sierra Leone, Humphreys and Weinstein found no significant correlation between participation in DDR programs and reintegration.
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They are quick to point out that lack of correlation does not mean that DDR had no positive impact. Still, Humphreys and Weinstein state that “the nonfindings should be seen as a wakeup call to advocates of these programs” to moderate their claims and devise better methodologies for measuring DDR’s impact.
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Peter Uvin found that DDR programs had marginal positive impacts in Burundi: ex-combatants who went through the program were more likely to be optimistic about the future.
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Other scholars argue that DDR programs can have unintended negative consequences for the reintegration of ex-combatants. According to Jennings, these include “cementing divisions between ex-combatants and non-combatants; hardening group identity; buttressing harmful prewar authority structures … ; and contributing to participation in criminalized economies.”
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And in countries like Tajikistan, former fighters were successfully reintegrated without DDR programs.
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In the end, then, it is not certain whether DDR programs positively affect reintegration.
The effect of reintegration payments to ex-combatants on their social reintegration is also unclear. Some studies have found that these payments did not create tensions between individual ex-combatants and their communities.
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Based on his ethnographic study of several communities in Burundi, Peter Uvin concluded that “the jealousy problem is much less severe than is often thought.”
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On the other hand, Blattman and Annan found that distribution of financial aid to ex-combatants in Northern Uganda generated high levels of resentment among
civilians.
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Similarly, Peter Barron discovered that separate programs for ex-combatants and for victims in Aceh “has in cases hardened conflict-era group identities.”
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By contrast, a factor that does appear to impact reintegration is an ex-combatant’s wartime role.
Humphreys and Weinstein found that “[p]ast participation in an abusive military faction is the strongest predictor of difficulty in achieving social reintegration.”
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They also found that:
the degree of abuse experienced by local communities during the war is powerfully related to the level of acceptance of ex-combatants. Consistent with stories told by some of our respondents about reintegration, their membership in a faction mattered not because of their personal characteristics, but because of the reputation of the group in the area where they lived.
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As will be discussed further below, these two findings suggest that transitional justice processes might aid the reintegration of such former combatants.
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DDR and Transitional Justice
Transitional Justice
Like DDR, transitional justice has expanded rapidly. Initially associated with trials and truth commissions, it now “comprises the full range of processes and measures associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”
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These processes now include memorialization, education, and local justice. There is also much greater effort to mix and match different mechanisms depending on the context.
Transitional justice has also been unmoored from its origins in the democratizing transitions of Eastern Europe and the Southern Cone. It can now be implemented before, during, after, and even without transitions. It can also take place before, during, and after violent conflict. Transitional justice has also expanded its remit from international crimes (e.g. genocide) and gross human rights abuses (e.g. disappearances) to violations of economic, social, and cultural rights.
There are ongoing policy debates over whether transitional justice should be minimalist or maximalist.
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The minimalist approach focuses on short-term legalistic goals (e.g. strengthening the rule of law, expressivism) whereas the maximalist approach emphasizes long-term goals that are less easily measured (e.g. ending impunity, reconciliation). Over the past several years, the transitional justice “industry”—exemplified by the International Center for Transitional Justice and the
International Journal of Transitional Justice
—has embraced a maximalist approach that links transitional justice to development, migration, and DDR.
Linking DDR and Transitional Justice
Rationales
The IDDRS module sets out three, somewhat incompatible, arguments for linking DDR and transitional justice: legal, moral, and instrumental. The legal argument is that DDR programs must conform to international human rights norms, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law.
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Hence, the IDDRS transitional justice module rules out the use of amnesties even though they can be effective tools for DDR.
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It also restricts DDR from using local justice processes that discriminate against women and children
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—despite the fact that “local justice addresses the (comparatively neglected) reintegration aspect of [DDR] programs more directly, quickly, and efficiently than other transitional justice measures.”
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The second argument is that DDR and transitional justice have “long-term shared objectives of reconciliation and peace.”
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While acknowledging that reconciliation is “a difficult concept to define or measure,” the IDDRS transitional justice module states that both DDR and transitional justice seek to build trust: between ex-combatants and society, and between victims and society.
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This maximalist conception of transitional justice as trust-building is rooted in the influential work of Pablo de Greiff, ICTJ’s research director.
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Finally, the instrumental argument is that transitional justice mechanisms may help the reintegration of former combatants. Unlike the previous two arguments, this one can be empirically tested. The IDDRS transitional justice module claims that transitional justice mechanisms: