Return, Responsibility and Reintegration in Central Africa: A multi-disciplinary exploration into endemic violence and social repair

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In 2015, the United Nations Refugee agency (UNCHR) reported that world-wide displacement hit an 'all time high' as conflict related violence and persecution increase and threat environments become more diffuse and complex. Quite shockingly, it was calculated that today, one in every 122 people is either a refugee, displaced or seeking asylum. Across huge swathes of the globe, people are uprooted as they try to negotiate profoundly difficult conflict circumstances, involving not only state armies, but non-state armed groups, criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and jihadists. To make matters more complex, individuals often occupy ambiguous victim-perpetrator statuses, moving between combatant and civilian roles, either through coercion or through choice. Central Africa has witnessed prolonged and repetitive forms of displacement for many, many years. In 2015, the UNHCR described forced displacement figures related to this region as 'immense'. To date, international organisations have prioritized 'going home' as the most durable solution to this crisis. Processes of 'return and reintegration' represent a huge practical and policy challenge for world governments and are therefore a critical international policy issue. This research project aims to study precisely these dynamics in the central and eastern African countries of Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and South Sudan through an inter-disciplinary, multi-sited ethnography of 'return'. By analyzing how refugees, internally displaced persons and former combatants negotiate and experience 'return' we aim to fill a large gap in current knowledge on the 'lifecycle' of conflicts in some of the world's most difficult places. Drawing on anthropology, comic journalism, history, heritage studies and political science we will focus on the everyday experiences of those attempting to build or re-build communities in central Africa, contributing to a better understanding of how conflict-affected societies constitute or re-constitute themselves. Our research will explore the relationships of returnees with each other, with the 'stayee' population and their engagement with national governments and international peacebuilding actors. We will examine if and how standardized peacebuilding approaches to return - such as Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR); transitional justice (TJ); and psycho-social support (PSS) are relevant to people on the ground who negotiate conflict realities and their legacies on a daily basis. We will also investigate those ubiquitous processes that are persistently set aside by international actors, including customary spiritual practices of individual and collective healing and ideas associated with religious belief. We will go beyond merely documenting the manner of return to focus specifically on how processes of return shape and reshape public authority across our research sites, questioning any assumed linear transition to 'civilian life' and to 'peace'. Our in-depth, inter-discipinary study of return across the Central African region will help us better understand the conditions under which conflict-affected societies are able to move on peacefully and/or live productively in situations of acute social stress and also the conditions under which mutuality is simply not possible and violence becomes endemic and seemingly inescapable. We also hope to place current central African experience in wider comparative and historical contexts giving fellow scholars and policy makers a much clearer picture of how and when social repair becomes possible in situations characterized by such staggering levels of upheaval and suffering.