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This chapter depicts how the process of coming home from war is understood and experienced among the various former combatants interviewed for this book. The idea of coming home, and the process of coming home, are in part metaphorical, as not everyone moves physically when they return home. This process also needs to be unpacked and problematized as the division between war and peace in individual lives is not clear-cut. This chapter is a starting point for such a discussion. Coming home can also be marked by a particular moment which is key
This book is about understanding how former combatants come home after war, and how their political lives are refracted by the war and the experience of coming home itself. In particular, it captures the political mobilization among former combatants as they come home from three very different types of war: civil war (Colombia), war of independence (Namibia), and interstate war (United States involvement in the Vietnam War). The book provides a much-needed long-term perspective on peace. It also demonstrates the artificial division between literatures across the Global North and Global South, and demonstrates how these literatures speak to each other just as the three cases speak to each other. The novel use of interviews to document life histories and the inside perspective they provide also give a unique insight into the former combatants’ own perspectives on the process of coming home and their sense of political voice. This book is not about peacebuilding in the sense of interventions. Rather, it examines peace as a process through studying the lived experiences of individuals, displaying the dynamics of political mobilization after disarmament across time in the lives of fifty former combatants. The book demonstrates how the process of coming home shapes their political commitment and identity, and how the legacy of war is a powerful reminder in the lives of these former combatants long after the end of the war.
Wars have a multitude of personal consequences, but they also have societal consequences as a result of the political lives that develop in their wake. Just as the war and coming home shape the politics of these former combatants in multiple ways, these former combatants shape larger processes of maintaining peace, politics, statebuilding, welfare systems, and democracy. This book sought to depict an insider's understanding of the experience of living politics after war, and how this process is understood by individual former combatants across
has ended. This book is not about peacebuilding in the sense of interventions. Rather, it examines peace as a process through studying the lived experiences of individuals. By focusing on the long-term political mobilization of former combatants after disarmament, the book displays how the dynamics between political mobilization , identity , and networks vary across time in the lives of fifty former combatants as they move toward peace and coming home. “Coming home” is not a clear-cut experience, and is one that needs to be unpacked. The book
This chapter turns to the political activity the former combatants have engaged in after war. Their political mobilization has waxed and waned over the years, and their veteran identity as well as veteran networks play a role in this dynamic. As such, the chapter tries to display how former combatants connect their experience of war, and of coming home, to their subsequent political mobilization. The chapter shows how experiences covered in the earlier chapters – such as coming home, questions of identity, relationship with the state, and
the war itself and also coming home influence this process. The veteran identity is salient for almost everyone, and, as they tell us, the importance of this identity has increased over time. For most, the war experience is inescapable, not least because war is something which society positions itself in relation to, as well as against. Aspects of this veteran identity imply political engagement: for instance, “duty”, “responsibility”, and “service to others” are named as common traits by participants from all three cases, as obligation during war translates to an
screaming at them to stop. My friend and I said nothing as we walked by, and then, almost when we felt we might have been out of earshot of the drama, we talked briefly about other stabbings that had been in the news. Then the news more generally. Then other things. Then nothing for a while, until we arrived at the bar. A couple of days before all this I’d been coming home from the gym – having taken to waking without an alarm, and being at the gym before 5.30 am. It meant the streets were still quiet when I left the flat, before the city-centre businesspeople were even
‘Domingo’). They are phantoms: ‘Je m’appelle Nana.’ ‘Moi, Dimanche.’ As Nana and Domingo, they make love. They are not ever not themselves nor ever quite themselves either. After the phone call, a series of images is projected of what Nadine might look like and the situations in which Carlos might find her: at a café, walking, carrying books, coming home. Each of the images are of
focused on the expulsion of the expellees from their homelands, including a controversial work by Alfred de Zayas30 and a collection of essays edited by Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak.31 In addition, Coming Home to Germany?, a volume edited by David Rock and Stefan Wolff, contains several contributions on Connor_02_MainText.indd 3 10/8/07 12:36:09 4 Refugees and expellees in post-war Germany the integration of expellees in post-war Germany.32 Pertti Ahonen’s excellent monograph, After the Expulsion, published in 2004, analyses the interaction between the expellee
). 8 For example, see G. Conaty (ed.), We Are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015). 9 B. Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement (New York: Routledge, 2015). 10 D.F. Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, Curator: The Museum Journal, 14:1 (1971), 11–24. 11 R. Janes, Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 31. 12 P. Schorch, ‘Assembling Communities’. See also Introduction, above