The Community Reintegration Project

This paper explores how reintegration strategies within disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes have evolved and tries to determine the reasons why, from an empirical point of view, a community reintegration approach is more likely to promote reconciliation in a war-torn society. After reviewing the current literature on DDR, its relation to social capital and reconciliation, and the conceptualization of community reintegration, the paper addresses the government-led DDR process in Colombia, thoroughly analyzing the JICA, “Project for the Support of Entrepreneurship and Employment for the Households of Demobilized Ex-Combatants and the Recipient Communities,” initiated in 2008. Personal and social profiles of the participants of the project, as well as individual surveys on specific topics, were used in the assessment. Two major findings could be identified from the empirical analysis of the project. On the one hand, the community reintegration approach encourages economic reintegration of a complete household and not only of one individual. On the other hand, such an approach supports the creation, and not only the reconstruction, of a new social capital where former combatants and their families may reintegrate into. In many occasions, ex-combatants have to settle down in places different from their hometowns and away from family and friends, making it impossible to reconstruct a social network that did not exist before. Economic reintegration of entire households and facilitating the existence of a strong social capital are elements that may indeed promote reconciliation in post-conflict situations.