Special Section introduction: intimacies of violence, ex-combatants, and post-conflict justice

Introduction

This aim of this Special Section is to bring into focus complex narratives around violence and intimacy in relation to ex-combatants. The contributors and I are interested in the affective spaces constructed in and through violence, and the sequelae that these may provoke. More specifically, where and how does the experience of perpetrating violence meet intimacy and affect? How does the memory of violence shape post-conflict affective relationships? To what extent does political violence feed into intimate violence in post-conflict societies, and what is the role of intimate forms of violence in the development of political positioning in post-conflict reconstruction? How do the politics around intimate forms of conflict-related violence challenge or entrench peacetime patriarchal relationships? These are some of the questions raised in these articles, as they explore the narratives about, experiences with, and memories and performances of violence and affect among ex-combatants.

Attention to post-conflict research, policy, and intervention has surged in the last 25 years. Peacebuilding and transitional justice processes, with an important amount of involvement from international organizations, are now widely accepted in most post-conflict situations, though successful adoption varies widely. The comprehensive inclusion of ex-combatants in such processes has been difficult across post-conflict societies. There is a clear tension between the need for accountability, on the one hand, and truth telling, on the other. In the past, negotiations to end armed conflict typically included blanket amnesties for perpetrators, justified on the grounds that the prospect of prosecution for human rights violations could lead combatants to refuse to cooperate (García-Godos and Sriram 2013, 3). However, since the 1990s, such amnesties have come under increasing challenge from the rising international norm of accountability for serious international crimes (Lessa and Payne 2012, 1). Fundamental tensions have thus emerged between the paradigm of international human rights norms and the paradigm of power-sharing settlements often forged during peace negotiations (Vandeginste and Sriram 2011). In addition, the need for community-level reconciliation has also contributed to ambiguous levels of adherence to international frameworks of human rights law and transitional justice. In response, countries in transition have taken a variety of approaches when grappling with the “complex and dynamic equation between the demands of peace and clamor for justice” (Theidon 2009, 3).

Central to this tension between truth and justice is the challenge that ex-combatants may pose to transitional justice’s tendency to conceptualize victims and perpetrators as discrete and homogeneous groups (McEvoy and McConnachie 2012). Within the literature, particular focus has been accorded to child soldiers and female ex-combatants as “the two notable exceptions where offenders may be considered victims” (McEvoy and McConnachie 2012, 533). Drawing on the case of Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who was convicted of war crimes, Erin Baines (2009) introduces the term “complex political perpetrator” to denote someone whose positions within crisis settings are so marginal that violence becomes a means of political agency and gaining a degree of control over their lives. Baines (2009, 183) questions the ability of punitive transitional justice to address complex political perpetrators due to the inability of prosecution to account for the perpetrators’ concomitant victimization, thus compounding their exclusion and othering. Examining the experiences of female ex-combatants from the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Sanne Weber (2021, 265) argues that they should also be considered complex political perpetrators due to their experiences of direct and structural violence before and during their membership of the armed groups. Weber (2021, 281) posits that, by adopting the lens of complex political perpetrator, transitional justice mechanisms could prompt deeper reflections on the social conditions that push women to join insurgencies, as well as providing female ex-combatants with adequate support during reintegration. The literature demonstrates that there have been only limited efforts by transitional justice practices to contend with the multiple subject positions that ex-combatants may occupy as both perpetrators and victims.

The relatively limited engagement with ex-combatants’ complex first-hand narratives of violence in transitional justice means that there are serious constraints to including ex-combatants in the construction of acceptable post-conflict narratives of past violence. Building peace must be restorative and inclusive to be sustainable, and ex-combatants, as the main actors in war, should be central to such efforts. They are men and women who often carry with them violent experiences that have profoundly affected their subjectivity and identity, and hence their social and political behavior post-conflict. Limited or partial inclusion and rehabilitation as members of society denies the influence that ex-combatants may have in their own political communities and the potential inter-generational sequalae and reverberations of their experiences in households, families, and communities.

In response to concerns over the potential for ex-combatants to undermine transitional justice by demanding amnesties and provoking grievances from victims and communities about the material benefits provided by reintegration programs, the literature has sought to highlight the potential synergies between transitional justice and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, and to call for better coordination between the two often separate domains (García-Godos and Sriram 2013; Waldorf 2009a, 2009b). This literature points to the potential congruences between transitional justice and the reintegration component of DDR due to their shared aims of rebuilding trust and preventing the recurrence of violence (Waldorf 2009a, 23). Developing this further, Kimberly Theidon (2009, 5) argues that DDR and transitional justice would be enriched not only through better coordination, but also by adopting a gendered analysis to “explore the connections between men, weapons and the use of violence,” and to design strategies to construct masculinities that do not incentivize and perpetuate violence and militarism. To do so, we believe that we need to listen carefully to the stories that ex-combatants tell and construct about the intimacies of violence.

We use “intimacy” as a lens through which to study the complex affective ties that are forged among men in the military, and how these relate to the intimacies of sexualized violence, military governance, post-conflict family life, and memory-work. Conceptually, then, “intimacies of violence” works at different levels: as the intimacy between men provoked by collectively receiving and enacting physical and sexual violence, as the way in which their affective ties to past violence shape their collective political positioning, and as the reverberations of violence in post-conflict intimate relationships. Intimacy refers to the sharing of experiences that are perceived as very personal and even secret but that are often part of the liminal space between the public and the private, or can even be located squarely in the public sphere, as Lauren Berlant (1998) has argued. To study the intimate allows us to uncover the ambiguity of the rigid division between public and private spheres – between sex and the military base, between the base and geopolitics, between reproduction and reproductive policy, between private experience and memorialization, between private truth and public justice (Peterson, Barabantseva, and Ní Mhurchú 2018). As such, the attachments that people establish in intimacy are profoundly shaped by the public infractions on intimate lives, affecting, as Judith Butler (2004) would say, what one can desire and can be. Importantly, we desire intimacy (Berlant 1998, 285) even – or perhaps especially – in the most atrocious contexts.

The following three articles aim to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of post-conflict accountability and intimacies of violence, from large-scale comparative analysis to very local and narrative reflections. Together, the articles point to the importance of our focus on intimate violence for processes of accountability and reconciliation, and for addressing persistent gendered violence.

Jessica Anania explores the continuum of gender violence between war and peace by mapping the inclusion of intimate partner violence (IPV) in transitional justice processes. She has developed the Gender Violence in Truth Commissions (GVTC) database, through which she has identified and coded mentions of IPV in the final reports of 50 truth commissions, supporting an argument for including IPV explicitly in transitional justice mechanisms. The evidence that Anania presents confirms that conflict-related violence is often intimate, and that IPV is always political. The dismantling of the public violence/private violence binary forces us to take IPV as a serious element in the overall persistence of social fragmentation and violence.

Leigh Payne and Kiran Stallone zoom in on the transitional process in Colombia, and on confessions of sexual violence on the part of former FARC members. They argue that, by acknowledging past sexual violence and expressing remorse, these confessions could help to bring about norm change on such violence in Colombia. Their analysis of public statements about acts of sexual violence show how confessions can lead to more open discussions about sexual violence in the conflict, and hence about gender violence in transitional justice more broadly. Using a dramaturgical approach, Payne and Stallone demonstrate how performance and script can become the buffer between intimate acts of violence and the public need for accountability.

The last article in the Special Section hones in even further. Lurgio Gavilán and I provide a set of personal reflections on the ethical implications of researching sexual violence directly with ex-combatants in Peru. Gavilán’s starting point, as a Peruvian veteran and, arguably, a complex political perpetrator himself, is autoethnographic, while mine, as a gender studies scholar situated in the West, is grounded in feminism. Our collaboration across epistemological differences, and the ethical implications of interviewing victimizers about the intimacies of violence, including sexual violence, and seeking to publish the findings of that research, prompted questions about the limits of accountability, memory, and reconciliation that we attempt to address in our article.

Together, these three articles aim to contribute to furthering our understanding of the role of gender, intimacy, and affective processes in post-conflict transitions, and in doing so feed into thinking about the potential role of ex-combatants in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes. None of this is straightforward, easy, or formulaic. The intimacy of the violence perpetrated is reflected in post-conflict silence and denial, and hence the difficulty of retrieving reliable data. As Gavilán suggests, sometimes forgetting is a survival strategy; some things are too difficult to even remember, let alone speak. However, while we may empathize with this sentiment, we may also think of the persistence of gender violence in all spheres of life, in particular for women and children in post-conflict societies, and the responsibility that we, as researchers of conflict-related violence and post-conflict processes of reconstruction, have toward understanding these continuities across space and time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work for this Special Section was part of the research project “Intimacies of Violence” (IC3100040) funded by the British Academy.

Notes on contributors

Jelke Boesten

Jelke Boesten is Professor of Gender and Development at King’s College London, UK. She has written extensively on sexual violence in war and in peace, social policy and politics, and gender-based violence in Latin America, in particular in Peru.