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

2015年，联合国难民署（UNCHR）报告称，随着与冲突有关的暴力和迫害增加，威胁环境变得更加分散和复杂，全球流离失所人数达到了“历史新高”。令人震惊的是，据计算，今天每122人中就有一人是难民、流离失所者或寻求庇护者。在全球大片地区，人们在艰难的冲突环境中流离失所，这些冲突不仅涉及国家军队，还涉及非国家武装组织、犯罪团伙、毒贩和圣战分子。让事情变得更复杂的是，个人往往占据着模糊的受害者-加害者身份，要么通过强迫，要么通过选择，在战斗人员和平民角色之间移动。中非已经经历了许多许多年的长期和反复的流离失所。2015年，联合国难民署称与该地区有关的被迫流离失所人数“巨大”。迄今为止，国际组织已将“回家”作为解决这场危机的最持久办法。“回归和重新融合”的过程对世界各国政府来说是一个巨大的实际和政策挑战，因此是一个关键的国际政策问题。本研究项目旨在通过跨学科、多地点的“回归”民族志，精确地研究中非共和国、刚果民主共和国、乌干达和南苏丹等中非和东非国家的这些动态。通过分析难民、国内流离失所者和前战斗人员如何谈判和经历“回归”，我们的目标是填补目前对世界上一些最困难地区冲突“生命周期”知识的巨大空白。借鉴人类学、喜剧新闻学、历史学、遗产研究和政治学，我们将重点关注那些试图在中非建立或重建社区的人的日常经历，有助于更好地理解受冲突影响的社会是如何构成或重建自身的。我们的研究将探讨返回者之间的关系，与“滞留者”人口的关系，以及他们与国家政府和国际建设和平行动者的关系。我们将研究是否以及如何采用标准化的建设和平方法来遣返——例如解除武装、复员和重返社会（DDR）；过渡时期司法；和社会心理支持（PSS）与每天在实地谈判冲突现实及其遗留问题的人有关。我们还将调查那些被国际行动者持续搁置的无处不在的过程，包括个人和集体治疗的习惯精神实践以及与宗教信仰相关的想法。我们将超越仅仅记录回归的方式，特别关注回归过程如何在我们的研究地点塑造和重塑公共权威，质疑任何假设的线性过渡到“平民生活”和“和平”。我们对中非地区返回的深入跨学科研究将帮助我们更好地了解受冲突影响的社会能够在严重社会压力的情况下和平前进和/或富有成效地生活的条件，以及根本不可能实现相互关系的条件，暴力成为流行病，似乎不可避免。我们还希望将当前中非的经验放在更广泛的比较和历史背景中，让学者和政策制定者更清楚地了解，在动荡和痛苦程度如此之高的情况下，社会修复是如何以及何时可能实现的。

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.