Life after Insurgency: Reintegration of Colombian Ex-combatants after the 2016 Peace Agreement

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Usually framed within the Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration framework (DDR), widely regarded as a mainstay of peace agreements and related peace support operations, the reintegration of former combatants has become a major post-conflict endeavour for both national governments and international organisations. Succinctly defined as the process by which former combatants gain civilian status and sustainable livelihoods, reintegration has often been approached as an external intervention or state policy. Reintegration is considered, among experts, as the most problematic phase of DDR and reintegration programmes are often criticised for their overblown expectations and unclear ends. By approaching reintegration exclusively from a top-down perspective and focusing excessively on assessing programmes based on externally imposed criteria, the meaning and content of sustainable reintegration from the standpoint of the ex-combatants have remained largely under-researched. Hence, the proposed research aims to offer a nuanced approach to the study of reintegration, which focuses on lived experiences rather than programmatic ends.The 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) brought thousands of combatants to the cusp of civilian life and their full political, social and economic reintegration is a key determinant of post-conflict stabilisation and future peace negotiations. Thus, this research aims to make an original contribution to the study of DDR by exploring reintegration, not as an external intervention, but rather as a set of processes embedded within the lived experiences of ex-combatants and their communities. More specifically, the project will enquire what 'reintegrating into society' means for the ex-FARC guerrillas and how this notion relates to other complex post-conflict accommodation processes. To this end, this research will focus on the local historical and political context as well as the ex-FARC's insurgent project, internal relations and organisational culture. Methodologically, the project will privilege life history inquiry in order to gain contextualised understandings of how the ex-combatants experience various post-insurgency processes such as identity reconstruction, demilitarisation and re-socialisation. By bringing the narratives of the ex-combatants to the fore, this research also seeks to explore the role that human agency, political ideology, and social relations play in the ex-FARC's reintegration experience and to challenge traditional DDR discourses that portray ex-combatants as either mere security risks or passive recipients of reintegration benefits. Life histories will be complemented by observations and in-depth interviews with community members, ex-combatants' relatives, and practitioners at the reintegration locality where fieldwork will be conducted.This research will make an original contribution to existing studies on Colombia's DDR, conflict resolution, post-conflict violence, political transitions, and peacebuilding. It aims to inform future research that further elicits the voice of those typically excluded from dominant discourses, produces longer-term retrospective analyses of the FARC's reintegration, and conducts comparative studies of Colombia's and other post-conflict settings.