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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.
cooperation) between them, and between some of the questions they are asking – for example, questions about the modalities of humanitarian aid; about how, and under what conditions, studies are conducted; about the roles and capacities required of people who serve as intermediaries between the investigators (analysts and practitioners) and the subjects of – or local actors in – conflicts (e.g. current members of armed groups, former combatants, citizen activists and movement spokespeople); about gathering and evaluating witness accounts; and about how difficult it is to
are a grass-roots arts collective, mainly creating vast eye-catching murals across Colombia – particularly in conflict-affected areas. They are also a community organisation, working with youth, social leaders and former combatants on community cohesion projects, in which they actively employ their arts practice. At the time of introduction, they had never drawn a comic or illustrated for animation. When searching for creative collaborators for the
This chapter scrutinizes the role played by fellow former combatants in the lives of the research participants after coming home from war. The experiences, as well as the political meaning, of coming home and being a veteran (in the sense of a political identity) are all mediated through the social networks which surround them. This chapter demonstrates what meaning is attached to the network of other veterans and what role these networks play and have played in their lives as understood by the former combatants themselves. These networks
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
Independently of the path that each one of us decided to follow, or the different actions we took during the militant period, our way of thinking and acting has a trace of the times when we were militants. Joaquin, C6, a former M-19 guerilla Life after war is intrinsically political for former combatants. As wars end, societies and individuals face a period of transition, and former
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
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
What does it signify to these former combatants to be a “veteran”? How is it filled with meaning and how is it understood politically? This chapter shows how people's experience as former combatants is turned into a veteran identity; the way that veteran identity is formulated contains an impetus for political action. The chapter goes on to examine how this identity is constructed by the former combatants themselves. This is central to capturing an insider's perspective of how these former combatants understand and depict their own political
an important backdrop to the rest of the book, particularly in relation to any similarities in the political lives of the former combatants. First, Namibia. The conflict and war there were long. After the First World War, Namibia (then South West Africa) had been administered by South Africa, and then after the Second World War South Africa implemented apartheid rule in Namibia. There was resistance to South African rule, due in part to the system of migrant labor, and in April 1960 exiled resistance leaders (including Sam Nujoma) established