The political consequences of reintegration programmes in current peace-building: a framework for analysis

摘要

This article demonstrates how democracy and peace-building can interlink at the micro-level, as demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) programmes feed into democratisation via their rarely studied political impact among individual ex-combatants. Using the reintegration experiences of ex-combatants in Liberia and the literature on policy feedback, this article demonstrates the varying impacts of current peace-building on the politics of ex-combatants, and develops a framework to analyse this relationship further in other cases. This theoretical framework offers a tool to grapple with and make sense of the political consequences of DDR, thereby clarifying how reintegration programmes structure and condition the ex-combatants' continued political voice. In particular, it is suggested that reintegration programmes influence the politics of ex-combatants either through resources obtained in the programmes, enabling access to politics in a different way, or through their institutional design and procedural traits, offering cognitive cues that either emphasise democratic norms or promote conflict in politics at large.