Assumption 1. Ex-combatants return states to war

The notion that ex-combatant dissatisfaction can return a country to war has underpinned DDR programmes since their early post-Cold War inception.Footnote ³³ The UN secretary-general asserted that ex-combatant dissatisfaction following the first Liberian civil war in 1997 led to remobilisation in 1999.Footnote ³⁴ But the exact sequence of events that led from dissatisfaction to a full-scale return to war is left vague, as is the subject of remobilisation; that is, to what extent were these the same ex-combatants, and to what extent did they remobilise in similar groups to 1997? The ‘return to war’ claim also relies upon a dubious causal chain. If ex-combatants cannot find new livelihoods, the claim asserts that they will protest violently or turn to crime to support themselves. The claim conflates street protests with widespread political instability and conflict. It pairs ex-combatant dissatisfaction with only one remedy (war-making) and universalises the popularity of that remedy among all ex-combatants. A 2008 US Institute of Peace survey found, however, that two-thirds of Liberian ex-combatants said they would never go back to war.Footnote ³⁵ Another 2008 survey found that only two of 466 young ex-combatant respondents said they would join an armed group if fighting were to resume, and only one said he would join a conflict in a neighbouring country.Footnote ³⁶ The return to war claim disregards the deep scepticism that most Liberian ex-combatants have about the future efficacy of war.

The return to war claim also erases politics from war-making, and the role of leaders in creating and sustaining wars. Although academics and policymakers understand war to be a complex phenomenon that results from deeply rooted and more proximate causes, DDR discourse tends to present a simplistic picture of war as capable of being ignited through the ‘spiralling up’ of ex-combatant protests and/or ex-combatant banditry and criminality. The suggestion that the disgruntlement of ex-combatants in 1997 Liberia contributed to their subsequent remobilisation in 1999 fails to account for the policies of Charles Taylor, regional political dynamics, and the issues of identity and representation that analysts of the 1999–2003 conflict recognise as the precipitating and root causes of conflict. Re-recruitment into neighbouring wars is also said to follow ex-combatant dissatisfaction. Re-recruitment, however, does not mobilise ex-combatants into ‘any old conflict’ but rather into already-existing conflicts that have their own history, causes, and protagonists. The dissatisfaction of an ex-RUF combatant in Sierra Leone may have been a facilitating cause of re-recruitment among some expatriate fighters active in Liberian armed movements, and cause of conflict exacerbation in Liberia, but not a cause of the Liberian conflict itself. Research into reintegration dynamics elsewhere has proffered a more nuanced approach, deprioritising the linear association between dissatisfaction and war recurrence and instead emphasising how complex understandings of combatants' personal security influence whether reengagement with violence occurs, or whether other, non-violent strategies are pursued.Footnote ³⁷

In the threat narrative, danger attaches to the figure of the ex-combatant because DDR discourse biologically embeds violence in the character and disposition of ex-combatants. The secretary-general has referred to Liberian ex-combatants collectively as ‘a volatile group’.Footnote ³⁸ The lack of military discipline of the LURD, MODEL, and NPFL, along with their indiscriminate targeting of civilians, is presented as demonstrating a natural inclination toward barbaric violence. The narrative goes so far as to imply that ex-combatants are the font of all violence, regardless of whether or not it was initiated by ex-combatants: individuals who engage in violent intimidation in Liberia, if they are not ex-combatants, are said in the Hotspots to demonstrate ‘ex-combatant behavior’. The May 2009 Hotspot Assessment contains two references to community ‘mimicry’ of ex-combatant violence. The first discusses the use of violence to gain control of rubber production on Guthrie plantation, and the second relates to general violence within communities:

In these excerpts, violence is compartmentalised from the social, political, and economic relations between, say, rubber workers and management, and is instead characterised as behaviour modelled on (and therefore authored by) ex-combatants. The consequence is to conceal a long history of violence deeply embedded within Liberian society, reinforced through regional and international support to exclusionary Americo-Liberian regimes and through forms of violent economic organisation perpetuated by international and domestic plantation ownership. Ex-combatants become not simply inclined to violence; they are its font, its personification. To present all combatants as naturally violent is not only ahistorical but ignores the overt and subtle ways in which individuals during conflict, including those who were combatants, resisted violence through escape, subterfuge, and non-compliance.Footnote ⁴¹

The threat narrative also presents combatants as unstable elements by constructing them as apolitical and greedy opportunists. In Liberia, numerous and apparently contradictory shifts in factional allegiance from one conflict to another were presented as evidence of combatant opportunism rather than as a natural outgrowth of the changing context of war.Footnote ⁴² In reality, it is likely that fewer mercenary fighters existed than initially suggested.Footnote ⁴³ And assertions that Liberian combatants were greedy opportunists do not hold up to closer scrutiny. Only 4 per cent of ex-combatants cited ‘money’ as a reason for fighting in the conflict.Footnote ⁴⁴ Two major surveys confirm that security (for ex-combatants' communities and families) was the predominant reason why fighters joined.Footnote ⁴⁵

The claim that ex-combatant criminality could ‘spiral up’ to threaten security in the post-conflict state relies upon the assumption that ex-combatants naturally and seamlessly turn to lives of crime after conflict. But in Liberia UNMIL found that the non-combatant community is just as likely to resort to criminal enterprise.Footnote ⁴⁶ Liberia's own TRC concluded that domestic and foreign businessmen and political authorities, and not the ex-combatant rank and file, committed the most serious economic crimes during the war.Footnote ⁴⁷ Associating ex-combatants exclusively with post-conflict criminality thus disguises the role of external, and Western, actors in the economic structures that sustain crime (trade routes, money laundering networks, and transnational brokerage systems).Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite well-established complicity and involvement of external actors in resource predation during the Liberian conflict, UN-imposed sanctions focused on internal production and supply of timber, diamonds, and rubber, and not the transnational and international networks that converted resources into arms. Presenting wars in the global south as ‘criminal’ aberrations and ex-combatants as uniquely crime-prone after war overlooks the long history of criminal rent-seeking in all wars and neglects the ways in which criminality might be deeply embedded in the system of international relations itself.Footnote ⁴⁹

Assumption 2. Ex-combatant association is threatening

The continued interaction of ex-combatant groups after war can sustain the violent legacy of civil war. Vulnerable young combatants can find themselves forced to pay bribes to their former commanders, or to work for them without payment. Groups of ex-combatants can intimidate local communities to consolidate commanders' economic and political status after war. But even non-violent forms of ex-combatant association, including collective economic ventures and formal and informal means of social interaction, are constructed as threatening to the peace process because any association is said to evidence ‘residual chains of command’ among ex-combatants.Footnote ⁵⁰

UNMIL conducted its Hotspots Assessments between 2006 and 2009 to analyse the extent to which ex-combatant chains of command remained intact and threatened state security after the war. UNMIL concluded that chains of command persist when ‘ex-combatants continue to take orders from their former commander on a daily basis’.Footnote ⁵¹ Its interest in monitoring ex-combatant chains of command was motivated not only by the potential threats that quasi-mobilised ex-combatants would pose to the state but also by welfare concerns for vulnerable ex-combatants trapped in social structures leaving them open to manipulation and exploitation by former commanders. Although its initial estimation in 2006 was that persistence of command structures was a problem, by 2008 UNMIL had concluded that no nationwide networks existed among NPFL, LURD, or MODEL combatants. It also found, however, that commanders often maintained contact with former subordinates along personal, economic, and political lines.Footnote ⁵²

Although the Hotspots began with a narrow focus on the extent to which chains of command constituted an ongoing threat to peace in Liberia, and although they are careful to distinguish between national and localised forms of insecurity, the focus of analysis in successive Hotspots tends to conflate ex-combatant visibility in communities with mobilisation, and tends to present visibility as a prima facie threat.Footnote ⁵³ High levels of ex-combatant organisation in economic and youth groups are taken as evidence that ‘chains of command could be activated and very quickly become effective’.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is unclear, however, on what basis the assessments reach this conclusion: how specifically do youth groups organised around trade and sport become ‘quickly’ mobilised for the purposes of violent conflict? There is no indication in the Hotspots as to what specifically makes non-violent youth groups a potential threat, other than the ‘alarming’ lack of respect they show to local authorities.Footnote ⁵⁵ This assessment is curious given that, elsewhere in the Hotspots, not to mention most studies of pre-conflict Liberia, local authorities are singled out for their long history of exploiting and mal-treating youth, so an alarming lack of respect is unsurprising in context, and arguably exists within and because of a general legacy of abuses by security services and other agents of authority.

The Hotspots often imply that the mere presence of ex-combatants within a group becomes threatening. And they do so despite their own finding that ‘most’ organised groups in Liberia ‘mobilize as social security or economic network[s] aimed at enhancing opportunities for trade in a certain area of commerce’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The final Hotspots Assessment concludes that ex-combatants were included in civil society groups as ‘ordinary members of the community’ and ‘not because of their combatants' skills’ yet the same assessment then scrutinised these civil society groups as threats simply because they included ex-combatants. It argues that any civil society group, if ex-combatants or youth form part of it (which is, after all, an aim of social reintegration), could ‘potentially be involved in incidents in the future’, and listed numerous trade unions and youth groups as ‘likely future threats to public order’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Not ‘possible’ threats but ‘likely’; association made synonymous with mobilisation.

Independent surveys and international guidance on DDR mirror the Hotspots' problematic constructions of ex-combatant association as threatening. A well-regarded 2008 survey found that 75 per cent of ex-combatants reported never going to their former commanders for financial aid or assistance, but goes on to say: ‘Troubling, however, is the finding that 22% of the DDRR program completers sustain routine ties compared against the sample's population average of 14%.’Footnote ⁵⁸ The study does not specify why this is ‘troubling’ – presumably it is that DDR itself can hurt demobilisation by giving ex-combatants incentives to stay in touch with former commanders, an activity represented as per se dangerous. The 2005 UNDP Practice Note on DDR argues that UNDP should ‘only support associations of ex-combatants that emerge at the grass roots level within the context of the broader community’. More ‘national’ or ‘top-down’ associations risk perpetuating chains of command and individuals' self-identification as ex-combatants.Footnote ⁵⁹

Ex-combatants are sometimes sources of instability, but the threat narrative presents them as likely or always threatening even in the face of evidence that they are also sometimes sources of conflict management and resolution. Even when ex-combatants worked to diffuse conflict in Liberian communities, the Hotspots present such action as threatening. For example, the Hotspots observed that some community leaders approach former commanders to assist in problems involving ex-combatants (delinquent loans, domestic disputes, public disorder) but then presented such action in a negative light because it made ex-combatant leaders visible within communities and usurped the primacy of the police.Footnote ⁶⁰ To assume a priori that association is always potentially violent denies ex-combatants the potential for non-violent association or agency over their own reintegration. Their association might sometimes reflect a desire to discuss problems, pool resources and information, or lobby governments and international agencies. One ex-combatant on Sinoe rubber plantation in Liberia told me, to the nods of dozens of others, ‘Ex-combatants need to address the problems of reintegration together, especially employment.’Footnote ⁶¹ The threat narrative would securitise this assertion of a need for economic and political mobilisation.

The construction of association as threatening is specific to the global south. In the global north, ‘veterans’ (semantically and ideologically constructed as distinct from ‘ex-combatants’) can associate with one another without that association being construed as a threat. They form lobbying groups to pressure their governments for more recognition and assistance, and their mobilisation is constructed historically as evidence of pressure group dynamics in democracy and civil society, even after contexts of civil war and even if such lobbying results in violence.Footnote ⁶² Of course, civil war contexts and post-conflict transitions in deeply divided societies add dimensions of inclusion and exclusion to different groups' claims to rights of association. But the actions of both ‘veterans’ and ‘combatants’ during and after war are often markedly similar (the commission of atrocities during war and the post-war difficulties of alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, suicide, crime, and violence) and yet, despite similarities, rigid distinctions are maintained. The disjuncture involved in construing any ex-combatant association as automatically threatening, evidence not of pressure group politics but of residual chains of command, suggests that deep scepticism of association is less a comment on the type and legacy of war context confronted and more a judgment separating the ex-combatants of the global south from the veterans of the north.

Assumption 3. Ex-combatant unemployment and employment are threatening

The secretary-general warned in 2004 that the threat posed by over 100,000 Liberian ‘unemployed, volatile and restive ex-combatants to security and stability in the country and elsewhere must be taken most seriously’.Footnote ⁶³ Even though surveys find the same levels of unemployment among ex-combatants as the rest of the population, the ex-combatant unemployed are presumed volatile and restive until proven otherwise. Such framing is not unique to Liberia, and is especially common in literature on child soldiers. Even though the overwhelming majority of unemployed African youth do not fight in civil wars, they are said to be ‘easily be absorbed into violence, whether urban gangs, illicit business dealings, or rebel militias in new civil wars’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Discursive representations of unemployment as threatening confuse the significance of ‘unemployment as disenfranchisement and marginalization’ with ‘unemployment as cause of war’. Unemployment and idleness matter a great deal but are not what caused Liberian youth to take up arms in the conflict. Youth overwhelmingly cited ‘security concerns’ as the reason they chose to fight.Footnote ⁶⁵ They did not trust the Taylor regime to provide long-term security for themselves, their families, and their communities. Nor were Liberia's combatant youth idle or unemployed before conflict: 60 per cent were in school, and 25 per cent were working. Only 11 per cent reported having nothing to do.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even though idleness did not credibly cause a ‘return to war’ in 1999 it is asserted to be capable of causing conflict at some unspecified future date.

In a counter-intuitive twist of the threat narrative, it is not just unemployment that is threatening. Employment is also constructed as a security threat, evidenced in the discourse surrounding the emergence of motorcycle taxi drivers in Liberia. Motorcycle taxi unions have sprung up around urban and semi-urban centres throughout sub-Saharan Africa to ferry passengers who cannot afford to travel via other means and over roads that are often un-passable in automobiles. In economies where few sectors thrive, motorcycle taxis are booming.

The boom is not without a downside, and one that is sometimes violent. Drivers have the reputation for being unsafe and for resorting to violence to resolve disputes between rival unions or between drivers and authorities, passengers, and automobile drivers. In post-conflict countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Burundi, motorcycle taxi unions tend to comprise many ex-combatant youth. In Liberia, the Bong MTU's 2900 membership is estimated to be 75 per cent ex-combatant. Because of their ex-combatant membership, MTUs are constructed not as presenting solely problems of public safety and order but as potential state security threats. Even though land disputes in Liberia (usually involving non-combatants) are more frequent and violent than incidents involving MTUs, ex-combatant membership in motorcycle taxi unions is classed as ‘the greatest potential threat to public order’ and ‘an easy target for mobilization in the context of the 2011 elections’ in the May 2009 Hotspot.Footnote ⁶⁷ MTUs, according to this logic, are LURD and MODEL writ small.

MTUs have initiated violence against other MTUs and against the Liberian National Police (LNP). On 27 February 2009, the Bong MTU staged a violent protest in Gbarnga in reaction to the murder of one of its members and the perceived lack of response by the LNP.Footnote ⁶⁸ The violence, according to UNMIL's own reporting, had nothing to do with the factional divisions of the conflict or the ex-combatant status of its members but rather implicated the new post-conflict order (namely, the perceived injustice of the LNP failing to respond to a murder in the community). UNMIL analysis nevertheless locates the threat within MTUs and not the LNP, even though the same assessment establishes that the LNP often behaves in a corrupt or exploitative manner towards MTUs (charging MTUs protection money or bribes). The paradox of framing MTUs as ‘the greatest potential threat to public order’ is further amplified by evidence that, elsewhere in Liberia, MTUs and the LNP have very good working relationships (some MTUs provide LNP officials with free transport in exchange for LNP-sponsored driver-training programmes). Furthermore, several UNMIL/RRR respondents characterised the MTUs differently from the Hotspot Assessments in interviews, citing them as evidence of ex-combatant reintegration and social and economic entrepreneurship. That the unions are also mixed between ex-combatants and non-combatant youth was cited as evidence of positive social reintegration.Footnote ⁶⁹ Given these nuances, the tendency for formal assessments of MTUs to fall back on the threat narrative is problematic.

Contrary to the narrative's elevation of ex-combatant threats, post-conflict violence in Liberia has taken on a variety of forms. Secretary-general's reports detail politically motivated electoral violence, violence from vigilante groups in Duala market in Monrovia, ritual killings and violent community reactions to ritual killings, and property and land disputes between ethnic groups.Footnote ⁷⁰ Threats specifically linked to ex-combatants do not rank in the top four reported sources of conflict in a 2007 UNDP survey (these were bad leadership, crime and lawlessness, land disputes, and unemployment and youth dissatisfaction). Even polygamy, ‘idleness’, and commercial sex and prostitution were ranked as bigger sources of conflict within communities than ex-combatant violence.Footnote ⁷¹

This section has critiqued the threat narrative by showing, first, that it overstates the scale and scope of threats traced to ex-combatants. Second, its presentation of ex-combatants is deterministic and neglects other threats to post-conflict communities from, for example, the state's new security structures, political elites, and rubber plantation owners. Third, it structures reintegration to construe success as negative peace: success means the absence of ex-combatant violence and not the extent or quality of integration. But most problematically, the post-conflict potential of ex-combatants is reduced to threat, obscuring the possibility that after conflict some ex-combatants are sometimes sources of social capital and agents of reconciliation and reconstruction.

Assumption 1. Ex-combatants are perpetrators

Resentment towards ex-combatants for receiving benefits is asserted to be inevitable and to exist prior to ex-combatant return to communities after war. The UNDP Practice Note asserts that ex-combatants are ‘likely to be perceived as perpetrators and additional burdens on the community, rather than as an asset’.Footnote ⁸² The Practice Note goes further, arguing that resentment of ex-combatant perpetrators can irreparably harm reintegration:

In the resentment narrative, there is no room for community solidarity with ex-combatants, except in ‘the very specific case of wars of liberation’. The IDDRS modify the Practice Note's determinism by arguing that ‘special treatment to ex-combatants may cause resentment among other groups who may view special or unique benefits to ex-combatants as an unjustified reward to the perpetrators of conflict’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The argument nevertheless represents a decontextualising appeal to probability (because something could happen, it inevitably will happen).

The perpetrator thesis asserts collective guilt among all ex-combatants for the war's atrocities and ascribes collective future guilt to all ex-combatants in its aftermath (they will turn to crime, they will pick up arms again if disappointed). A common dehumanisation strategy, the assertion of collective guilt justifies the community's fear and jealousy of them. Discursively, then, it is consistent for a UN report on employment generation to refer to ‘[e]x-combatants and victims alike’,Footnote ⁸⁵ as if the opposite of an ‘ex-combatant’ is not a ‘non-combatant’ but is instead and self-evidently a ‘victim’.

The perpetrator thesis presents resentment as existing prior to DDR, ignoring the ways in which the contours and duration of DDR themselves might shape and construct resentment. For example, negative experiences with cash payments in Sierra Leone led some donors to oppose cash reinsertion payments in Liberia. The lesson became, ‘Cash creates resentment.’ But in Sierra Leone resentment can be traced not to cash per se but to the programmatic modes of its dispersal: it was given at disarmament sites and not in communities of return, and was given in exchange for weapons or ammunition, which fuelled a market for small arms. In other cases (Mozambique, Liberia, and Burundi, for example) cash was not given in direct exchange for weapons and was spread out over several months in communities of return, minimising the problems encountered in Sierra Leone. Whether communities resent cash payments is also related to the success of information and community ‘sensitisation’ campaigns about the rationale and potential community gains of cash assistance to former fighters.Footnote ⁸⁶ Other programmatic choices can similarly help to minimise resentment; for example, quick impact projects and employment generation schemes that allow ex-combatants and communities to interact and work side by side.Footnote ⁸⁷ The resentment narrative is often presented as being static (communities will resent special benefits no matter what) yet these examples suggest that resentment is contingent upon the overarching design and implementation of DDR interventions.

DDR's demarcation between ex-combatant perpetrators and community victims corresponds to Makau Mutua's influential critique of human rights discourse, where he identifies a tendency to divide peoples into categories, pitting ‘savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In DDR discourse, ex-combatants are cast in the savage role (perpetrators to be resented), communities as victims (blameless, innocent, bystanders to conflict and therefore above it), and international actors as saviours (enlightened enough to ensure that DDR does not reward perpetrators or fuel resentment). Mutua argued that this discourse makes oppositional binaries possible: superior and inferior (‘their ex-combatants’ versus ‘our veterans’), and barbarity and civilisation (‘ex-combatant perpetrators’ versus ‘community victims’).Footnote ⁸⁹ Such constructions help DDR actors to mobilise resources by reassuring donors that they will assist sympathetic victims and not savages alone. The community is asserted to resemble the peacebuilding enterprise itself: liberal, peaceful, good. The community is constructed as the saviour's mimic, the civilised, good-hearted, cooperative entity, the colonial mission's reformed subject; the ex-combatant, in opposition, becomes the object of mockery, the colonial mission's threatening caricature.Footnote ⁹⁰

The tendency to demarcate post-conflict communities into separate categories of victim and perpetrator suggests that the bodies of ex-combatants might be uniquely ‘docile’ during DDR interventions because, more so than other ‘war affected’ or ‘vulnerable’ groups like refugees or IDPs, who are framed as victims of conflict processes, ex-combatants more closely align with Foucault's prisoners because of their construction as guilty perpetrators and potential menaces to society in need of rehabilitation.Footnote ⁹¹ As a result, they risk becoming a repository into which the international peacebuilding enterprise can dump its desires (to demarcate post-conflict populations as victims or perpetrators), its fears (to fix ex-combatants as frontline threats in the ‘coming anarchy’), and its interests (to conflate the return of ex-combatants to lives of basic poverty with success, which distracts from the failure of the development regime to lift combatant and non-combatant populations alike out of poverty). This in turn underscores how (unintentional) stigmatisation of ex-combatants might prop up the (intentional) agenda of neo-liberal peacebuilding. If ex-combatants do not deserve long-term support, then peacebuilding interventions that favour ‘self-reliance’, macroeconomic stability, and entrepreneurship are reinforced, whilst investment in employment, public works, and state-provided welfare support to post-war populations are either deprioritised or else actively discouraged.Footnote ⁹²

In the Liberian context, the resentment narrative oversimplifies the community's role during conflict. Where did Liberian ex-combatants come from, if not from ‘communities’? In Voinjama, Liberia, each of a group of ten former LURD combatants told me that their families and community leaders instructed and pressured them to fight.Footnote ⁹³ Four of these reported being violently recruited, but still cited the security of their families and communities as a reason for their participation (‘If I did not join, they would kill my family and friends’; and, ‘even though I was forced to fight, it was the best thing to provide security for my family’). Their individual experiences mirror the conclusions of two surveys in which both ex-LURD and ex-MODEL said it was for communities that they joined armed campaigns.Footnote ⁹⁴ For those young fighters violently coerced into fighting, the community is also implicated in failing to prevent their recruitment.

The community is deeply implicated in cycles of violence, and in each combatant's journey from civilian to combatant and back to civilian. Communities sustain complex structures not just of fighters but also of conflict's middlemen. As Nordstrom observed of simple perpetrator/victim dichotomies that reduce conflict to its constituent ‘combatants’:

Moreover, communities can threaten ex-combatants after war; they can perpetuate the corruption and discrimination that exploited and endangered youth prior to the war.Footnote ⁹⁶ They can also, as was documented in the Hotspots, exploit and victimise ex-combatants via illegal and exploitative labour schemes and extortion rackets.

The resentment narrative thrives despite the availability of destabilising counter-narratives. One counter-narrative is that the nature of the relationship between combatants and communities is more nuanced than the resentment narrative allows. After the conflict ended in Liberia, many ex-combatants from all factions migrated to rubber plantation communities because of the economic opportunities that rubber tapping presented. Ex-combatants (approximately 5,000 LURD ex-combatants at Guthrie and 500 MODEL at Sinoe) used intimidation and violence to assume control of plantation management and production, or else assumed positions of leadership within plantation security forces (for example, Taylor's militia on Cocopa plantation). Several plantation communities had good cause to resent ex-combatants. A 2006 report from UNMIL's Human Rights Section uncovered evidence of killings and sexual violence on the plantations, as well as deplorable living conditions for plantation residents. At Guthrie, in particular, plantation residents opposed the ex-combatant presence until UNMIL successfully relocated them by inducing them to join alternative vocational training programmes.

But on other plantations, the relationship between communities and combatants was more complex. At Sinoe, MODEL ex-combatants had links and family members already resident on the plantation, so the relationship between the ex-combatants and the plantation community was one where violent intimidation co-mingled with preexisting family and social ties connecting ex-combatants to non-combatant plantation residents. Even though the Liberian government failed to identify the rightful owners of Sinoe, the County Superintendent repeatedly tried to repossess it from the Community Welfare Committee (CWC), the organisation that former MODEL combatants had formed to manage Sinoe. The CWC, with support from the resident plantation population, resisted the Sinoe Superintendent's attempts. One such attempt, in August 2008, led to violent confrontations between the CWC and the Superintendent's representatives. The CWC's nine core members were subsequently arrested without indictment in October 2008 and detained illegally until February 2009. All of their assets were seized, also illegally and without compensation after the nine men were eventually released without charge. Additionally, plantation residents at Sinoe (ex-combatants and non-combatants alike) were routinely forced to pay bribes for concession rights and were illegally taxed for rubber processing. Numerous authorities at local and state levels were known to receive such payments from other plantation communities.Footnote ⁹⁷ On some plantations, then, culpability and victimisation were not clear-cut: ex-combatants were both perpetrators and victims, with some communities (Guthrie) resisting them but others (Sinoe) demonstrating a complex combination of support, empathy, indifference, and opposition.

A second counter-narrative is that community resentment might not be as widespread and deeply felt as suggested. The Bøås and Hatløy survey found that in most cases communities welcomed the return of ex-combatants.Footnote ⁹⁸ The majority of ex-combatants also report feeling accepted by communities in Liberia. In a 2008 UNMIL survey, 43 per cent of both ex-combatant and non-combatant respondents said ex-combatants are viewed with acceptance, and another 20 per cent went further, saying they are viewed with respect.Footnote ⁹⁹ Several officials reported in separate interviews in 2007 that reintegration assistance helped to mitigate social tensions rather than exacerbate it.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ex-combatants also returned in high numbers (58 per cent) to home communities.Footnote ¹⁰¹ These counter-claims match survey evidence from other DDR processes, suggesting that resentment might be overstated across cases.Footnote ¹⁰²

A third counter-narrative is that communities often help, support, and protect ex-combatants. The Hotspots found that several mining camps in Grand Gedeh and River Gee were unwilling to reveal ex-combatant identities or share information about them, with follow-up interviews stating that the cause for this unwillingness was not fear of reprisal but rather a more symbiotic relationship between former fighters and communities. Fourth, ex-combatants are also capable of performing conflict-mitigation and conflict-resolution roles in communities. As discussed in the previous section, members of communities often have approached erstwhile combatant commanders to help solve problems involving the rank and file.

Assumption 2. Communities are more deserving

The resentment narrative also relies upon appeals to equity, warning that ‘too much’ assistance for one group (ex-combatants) is unfair and could fuel social tensions as a result. But this argument is not premised upon equal entitlement to assistance between ex-combatants and communities after war; rather, it subtly implies that communities are more deserving of assistance than ex-combatants. At a conference organised by the UK government for parliamentary leaders from developing states, a prominent DDR consultant put it this way: ‘Ex-combatants are not the beneficiaries [of DDR assistance]; communities are. Ex-combatants are the recipients.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Ex-combatants do not (and ought not) benefit; they merely receive. The focus of assistance, and therefore dessert, is the community. In constructions of dessert, communities are granted agency over ex-combatants. Ex-combatants do not reintegrate; communities reintegrate them.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Dessert constructions neglect the heterogeneous makeup of communities and of their experiences of conflict (different community members were affected differently by war) and the variety of roles played by communities during and after war. They also locate ex-combatants as outside of communities, and in so doing ‘produce difference by differing’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet Liberian ex-combatants are community members, too. Bøås and Hatløy emphasise how ‘typical’ they are: before the war, ex-combatants ‘lived quite ordinary Liberian lives’, and after the war were found to be ‘like’ other Liberians: ‘poor, disenfranchised and without any access to or hope for upward social mobility’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To attribute conflict to combatants alone negates ‘the crucial role played through societal processes in the legitimation of war’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Follow-up programmes targeted both combatants and non-combatant community members. Community leaders chose who participated and who did not, and were encouraged to include ex-combatants on the projects, as well as other special target groups (for example, women). Yet several practitioners in Liberia mistakenly assumed that follow-up assistance was for ex-combatants alone and accused UNMIL, based on that assumption, of being ‘too obsessed with ex-combatants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A joint assessment commissioned by UNMIL, the World Bank, and UNDP included a ‘suggestion’ that public works projects ‘employ all youth irrespective of whether they are former combatants or not’, even though this was precisely what the programmes were doing.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Just as the threat narrative is totalising because it constructs the ex-combatant as threat regardless of whether the ex-combatant is employed or unemployed, the resentment narrative is similarly totalising because it stigmatises reintegration programmes even when they include community members.

External construction of community dessert tends to turn the ‘ex-combatant’ label into an epithet. Self-identification as an ex-combatant is assumed to be bad, a truth often presented as self-evident. A European UNDP official in Monrovia said,

This contrasts with a Liberian NCDDRR official, who said, ‘Ex-combatants do not want to be referred to as such. After all, many were forced into war.’Footnote ¹¹¹ The difference in these two opinions is accounted for by individuals' strategic adoption of the label: before a UNDP audience, it is advantageous to adopt the label in order to qualify for benefits.Footnote ¹¹² There is a programme on offer, with generous eligibility. Why would an ex-combatant not assert his or her combatant status? Meanwhile, in the community within which the NCDDRR official was embedded, the audience for ex-combatants was localised, creating incentives to discard the label to emphasise social inclusion.

To talk of communities deserving benefits more than ex-combatants underscores the way in which communities can also wield the ex-combatant label as an epithet for their own strategic reasons: to erase complicity for conflict, to scapegoat, and to articulate grievances against the international aid establishment. Digging deeper, however, communities often have complicated and contradictory feelings towards ex-combatants. A second NCDDRR official said,

When the community uses the term ‘ex-combatant’ as an epithet, it is possible that the community is doing so to scapegoat ex-combatants for more general societal problems. The application of ‘ex-combatant’ as a pejorative catchall to describe criminality, idleness, and menace linked to community resentment repeats across combatant contexts, albeit in different ways. That application, however, should be contextualised not as evidence of resentment but instead as the general tendency of many societies in the north and south to use epithets that express a generic distrust of youth, be it the ‘long hairs’ of the 1960s or the ‘chavs’ of today.Footnote ¹¹³

Examples of community solidarity with ex-combatants further destabilise the resentment narrative. Some communities have rejected the labelling of ex-combatants to protect them. Teachers and school administrators in Lofa County explained in interviews in 2007 that they very carefully and purposefully referred to young ex-combatants receiving educational assistance not as ‘ex-combatants’ but as ‘scholarship students’, to reduce the separation of such beneficiaries from their peers.

Assumption 3. Community-based approaches are superior to targeted assistance

Advice to DDR practitioners frames community-based approaches to reintegration in positive terms while negatively depicting ex-combatant-focused reintegration programmes.Footnote ¹¹⁴ When the necessity of some targeted programming is asserted, it is almost by way of apology, or justification. The 2011 secretary-general's report on DDR states, ‘Programmes should move as quickly as possible from individual, ex-combatant-focused reinsertion or reintegration to community-based reintegration: or, where possible, immediately adopt a community-based approach.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ The costs of not adopting a community-based approach where ex-combatants and non-combatant community members share benefits are said to be high: ‘Failure to do so will result in ex-combatants continuing to identify themselves as belonging to a special group outside society, retarding their effective reintegration into local communities.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ An appeal to equity is predicated on the absence of parallel support to communities.

The mid-term evaluation of DDR programmes in Liberia found that they were unsustainable because there was ‘no overall national recovery and development plan’ and ‘no parallel complementary programmes designed to operate at community level’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ My field visits to Voinjama in Lofa County in 2007 and Greenville in Sinoe County in 2009 corroborated that the most visible development assistance on offer was attached to DDR programming (although, as stated previously, this targeted both ex-combatants and non-combatant community members). Interviews with UNMIL officials verified that recovery assistance and development aid to communities affected by war has been slow to reach remote areas in the border regions and mining and plantation communities: poor infrastructure and insecurity were cited as the reasons. The resentment narrative would reverse the logic of the mid-term evaluation: rather than blame incomplete reintegration on the failures of the international development regime, the lack of community assistance is blamed on DDR programmes. The ‘quick move’ from targeted to non-targeted approaches, therefore, becomes de facto a euphemism for a move from internationally provided support to no support.

Given that spending on DDR programmes is a fraction of the overall development portfolio of major donors, the resentment narrative fails to answer two questions. First, why are there not more post-conflict programmes assisting communities? Second, why is community assistance the specific responsibility of DDR programmes and not the general development mandate of UNDP, ILO, the World Bank, and bilateral donors? With DDR often the only assistance on offer in remote communities, resentment is said to be a function of the special assistance received by ex-combatants rather than an indictment of the failure of the international development regime to assist post-war communities. My suggestion is not that community-based programmes are a bad idea: interviews with local UN staff and independent programme evaluations of infrastructure employment projects both emphasised that having community members work side by side with combatants enhanced integration and reconciliation. The assumptions buttressing preferences for community-based programming, however, might further differentiate combatants from communities.

The case of Liberia, however, is also instructive about how hegemonic assumptions about short-term assistance for ex-combatants can be subverted, showing that the same actors who disseminate narratives about community-based programming are not monolithic. They also evidence the capacity to innovate and transform modes of assistance. Although the Hostpots Assessments reify some tropes about ex-combatants, they critically challenge others; they consistently articulate the need to design follow-up programming to assist vulnerable ex-combatants in areas that received little support during the formal DDR process. Within UNMIL, many actors opposed the assumption that reintegration assistance should be short-term. Resisting critics who said it was ‘doing development’ and over-prioritising ex-combatants, UNMIL/RRR (with support from the World Bank, UNDP, and other actors) implemented follow-up programmes targeting ex-combatants and non-combatants that successfully employed over 70,000 Liberians for a total of 2.5 million working days, showing that it is possible to design community-based interventions that do not shy away from assisting ex-combatants. A 2010 high-level UN review of DDR concluded, in part based on the success of RRR's employment programmes, that more resources and longer-term follow-up programmes for ex-combatants are needed.Footnote ¹¹⁸ More broadly, the UN system is also moving towards recognition that longer-term assistance for ex-combatants is needed. The secretary-general recommends at least three years of UN reintegration assistance in his 2011 report.Footnote ¹¹⁹