The concept of Political Reintegration in current peace research

A large component of peacebuilding efforts today are the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs that target ex-combatant poulations, in an attempt to smooth the transition to civilian life and alleviate security risks in the transition phase. Research that today deals with the political aspect of reintegration has only done so in a rather limited and under-theorized fashion, and it is usually unclear why certain aspects have been chosen over others to represent political reintegration. I would argue that this limited conceptual understanding of what political (re)integration means has impaired research within this field. For instance, when political reintegration has been investigated there has not been a systematic identification and differentiation based on the level of analysis. This paper scrutinizes definitions of political reintegration both within the policy community and the academic community, clarifying what level of analysis is applied. Finally, this paper suggests that we need to explore political reintegration (at the micro level) in terms of two dimensions: the extent of ex-combatants’ political voice (i.e. political involvement) and the content of the ex-combatants’ political voice (i.e. democratic values and norms). Bringing conceptual clarification to the concept of political reintegration also helps us identify additional research agendas within this field