Demilitarization, Demobilization, and the Social and Economic Integration of Ex-combatants: Lessons from the World Bank Africa Experience

摘要

Africa was among the first battlefronts and final casualties of the cold war. Many devastating conflicts have persisted for 20 years or more. Some countries (such as Ethiopia, Eritria, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, and more recently, Angola, Chad, Liberia, and Mozambique) are emerging from years of cold war politics and internal civil strife, but pernicious internal struggles continue to plague others (Sierra Leone, Somalia, DR Congo, CAR, Republic of Congo, and the Sudan, for example). The damage inflicted on the social and human capital as well as the economic potential of these countries has been horrific. Of the estimated 80 million to 110 million land mines spread across 64 countries around the world, about 20 million are strewn across nearly half the countries of Africa. The impact of warfare on disinvestment, the destruction of physical infrastructure, and the deterioration of social and human capital through disability, death, and displacement is impossible to quantify. Armed conflict is surely one reason why at least 250 million people in Sub- Saharan Africa nearly half the population are living below the poverty line in the mid-1990s.