Citizens by Design? Explaining Ex-Combatant Satisfaction with Reintegration Programming

Abstract

After armed conflict, there is often a surge in programmes designed to consolidate the peace. During the transition to peace, the quality of programme management has been argued to shape public perceptions about government and citizenship. What aspects of programme management are most important? What implementation failures have the greatest negative effects? We study these questions in the context of a reintegration programme for former combatants in Colombia. We find evidence that programme implementation has strong impacts on participant satisfaction, regardless of programme outcomes. This suggests that how benefits are delivered matters as much as what is delivered.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Fundación Ideas para la Paz for making their data available. The authors are thankful for the support from the Uppsala Forum and the Department of Government at Uppsala University. We thank Jason Klocek, Markus Holdo and Enzo Nussio, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. The data and code are available upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary data

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. The authors contributed equally to all the aspects of the work.

2. For instance, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse have noted that ‘the processes of government, as apart from the policies, constitute an important, free-standing variable that has serious implications for the health of democracy’ (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2001, p. 147).

3. The risk that unhappy ex-combatants will return to war is sometimes overstated (see for example, McMullin, 2013), and former fighters also express their dissatisfaction politically rather than through violence. But it is nevertheless the case that ex-combatants’ satisfaction with reintegration programmes has important implications for social and political stability.

4. Programme participants’ level of knowledge about what they can reasonably expect from the social programme may have important impacts on how they perceive its efficacy (Shah, 2007b).

5. Some of this research suggests that negative experiences are more potent in destroying satisfaction or trust, whereas building trust or creating satisfaction may be harder.

6. There is also evidence that ‘paternalistic’ interventions have a corrosive impact on various forms of socio-political participation, but there is no direct indication of how this impacts satisfaction (Bruch et al., 2010, p. 221).

7. Many welfare programmes impose rigorous requirements as a way to reduce the number of users. Reintegration programmes generally do not have an incentive to diminish caseload: The challenge is to ensure that former combatants are enrolled in and complete the programme. It is important to note that the size of the caseload can also be controlled through the access criteria. For instance, in the case of Liberia and Sierra Leone the access criteria were loosened in order to catch a larger pool of participants.

8. Soss notes programme clients may also feel stigmatised – stereotyped and judged – should they fail to conform to the norms and expectations of programme staff (Soss, 1999, p. 78).

9. The major differentiating point in channel of entry is that unlike paramilitary fighters who directly enter the reintegration programme, FARC and ELN deserters are first transferred to a military programme which provides for basic needs (food, shelter), while combatants undergo a lengthy debriefing to verify their status as deserters, and extract intelligence information. Former guerrillas are subsequently transferred to the general reintegration programme (authors’ interviews).

10. Determining when an ex-combatant is fully reintegrated is a problematic question both empirically and theoretically, especially as reintegration can also be broken up into various components such as political reintegration, economic reintegration and social reintegration for example. The literature on reintegration has discussed this problem at length (see for example, Humphreys & Weinstein, 2007; Jennings, 2008; Özerdem, 2012; Pugel, 2007a; Söderström, 2015, pp. 6–17; World Bank, 2009).

11. Notable examples include the surveys conducted in Burundi (see Gilligan et al. 2013), Uganda (see Blattman, 2009) Liberia (see Bøås & Hatløy, 2008; Hill, Taylor, & Temin, 2008; Pugel, 2007b) and Sierra Leone (see Humphreys & Weinstein, 2006).

12. We also estimated GLM (generalised linear models) to account for the skewed distribution of the dependent variable. The results yielded by the OLS models still hold.

13. This is a first level subnational demarcation, equivalent to provincial level.

14. It is also probable that the effect reflects the specific timing of the survey. More recently, former paramilitary fighters have been linked to the formation of new criminal organisations (BACRIM), which have carved out niches in protection rackets and the narcotics trade, and attracted public opposition and stigma. But in 2008, when the survey was conducted, these groups were less notorious.

15. Around the time of the survey 34,000 out of 52,000 demobilised combatants participated in ACR activities (Nussio, 2011, p. 56).

16. This variable is not an interval variable.

17. These variables were recoded from one categorical variable. The 864 respondents who score 0 on all ‘Lost’ measures constitute a large baseline from which the other coefficients can be estimated.