Abstract
The reintegration of former combatants is now considered mainstream in the toolkit of interventions brought to bear in the quest to engender peace and prevent relapse into armed violence in conflict affected settings, as the transition to peace can be truncated if reintegration fails. However, many a reintegration programme has been preoccupied with the technocratic details of its projects, which are often detached from the realities on the ground in the communities to which ex-fighters are returning, overlooking ex-combatants’ experiences and their encounters with the dilemmas of reintegration. Therefore, focusing on the reintegration programme conducted for former militants in the Niger Delta, this dissertation explores the reintegration experiences and challenges the former fighters are grappling with and the everyday tactics they deploy to navigate, contest and re-appropriate the reintegration dilemmas and structures of marginality, and to resist pressure to return to violence in order to maintain everyday peace in their communities.
I argue that the reintegration experience for many of the former Niger Delta militants is a tale of broken promises, sense of betrayal, feeling cheated, economic woes, and ontological anxieties, resulting from the disruption of their armed group support framework and routines by the discourses and implementation shortcomings of the reintegration programme. In response to these threats, ex-combatants adopt a range of tactics namely: hustling, shadow economies and everyday narratives. Firstly, hustling is unpacked as an alternative livelihood and social navigation strategy that enables former fighters to earn a living beyond the eking afforded by the reintegration stipends, reassert their masculine identity as breadwinners, and subvert the paternalistic economic and political structures of their environment and the reintegration programme. It is also one of the ex-combatants’ tactics of everyday peace as it gives them alternative livelihood options to violence. However, hustling was also a path replete with risks and uncertainty bringing to the fore the complex milieu that ex-fighters have to straddle in their reintegration quest. Secondly, others fell back on underground shadow economic activities by going back to the river, a contested tactic they see as just a way to ‘survive’ yet which is considered illegal by those in authority. Rather than just opportunistic tactics for material gain, shadow economies are sites seized by ex-fighters to make claims for human and environmental resource rights. At the same time as challenging sanitised and binary notions of the everyday as enclaves of nonviolence resisting violence, these shadow practices disrupt dominant linear reintegration expectations for ex-fighters who become trapped in an interstitial cycle of departure and return from the community. Thirdly, some former fighters also developed everyday narratives, which are meaning-laden stories that people use to represent events and make sense of their experiences. Hence narratives emerged as significant sites where ex-fighters articulate meaningful tropes and worldbuilding frames that enable them to cope with the existential and cognitive contradictions implicit in their reintegration and which they can also leverage to re-appropriate dominant reintegration processes for their own benefits. The narratives can be in the form of absorptive narratives and subversive narratives. Absorptive narratives provide conflict calming functions in the sense that they enable ex-combatants to bracket off the contradictions of their everyday challenges and reintegration programme, and provide a framework that gives them something to hold on to or a system of meaning to keep life going and avoid return to violence. Through subversive narratives, ex-combatants maneuver and resist the structures and discourses of marginalization, assert their dignity, and even extract some material gains for themselves.
Thus, the dissertation contributes to the critical peace literature by connecting the everyday turn with ex-combatants’ reintegration praxis, shedding light on the ingenious ways they cope with and reappropriate the structures of the reintegration programme agenda. The focus on ex-fighters’ everyday reintegration tactics will challenge the dominant stereotypical portrayals of former combatants as security threats and passive violence driven actors, as well as the representation of post-hostility communities as enclaves of illiberal and dominated actors who are doomed without external assistance, by shedding light on the role of former combatants as agents of peace, the everyday tactics of nonviolence that they deploy to cope with the uncertainties and obstacles of reintegration programmes, and the role of communities in creating spaces using traditional, cultural and contextual peace resources and knowledge to facilitate their reintegration as a result of being left to their own devices by formal reintegration custodians and elites.
The study draws attention to the under-theorisation of everyday practices and narratives of ex-fighters which, though they appear mundane, are loaded with meaning, creativity, grit, peacebuilding agency, and defiance to power. This underscores the burden of survival that post-conflict populations at the margins have to put up with for continuity and some normalcy in their everyday life, in settings where the state is in perpetual retreat. The study has significant implications for ex-fighters’ agency, and the scalability, spatiality, and temporality of ex-combatants’ reintegration in peace and conflict studies. It also contributes to the debates on the prepolitical nature of ex-combatants’ everyday repertoires, the neglected but vital role of informal ex-fighters’ narratives and livelihood practices for sustainable reintegration, everyday peace, and preventing a relapse back to violence in many contexts where top-down DDR interventions have failed to connect to local aspirations and needs.