(RE)INTEGRATION AND "RE"TURN
The greatest burden of peacebuilding rests on the shoulders of those directly implicated in experiences with war and war-like violence - often against the backdrop of ongoing violence and insecurity.
At the end of the day, the individuals living in violence affected communities represent those who bear the greatest burden of building peace. Their lives are tapestries, interwoven threads of various experiences, relationships, identities, and geographies. However, prevailing dichotomous categories - e.g., victim/perpetrator and enlistment/reintegration - both oversimplify psychosocial dynamics and reproduce the very divisions they are often intended to resolve. Hoped-for interactions between these new neighbors of circumstance include reconciliation, reinsertion, reintegration, and return. But such RE monikers belie the lived experiences of these individuals, who often feel the ambivalence and ambiguity of simultaneously starting anew and “coming home” (all the more complicated by the common condition of resettlement in new geographies). Trust after Betrayal focuses on the everyday lives of these individuals in order to advance theory and practice in the fields of anthropology, social psychology, and peace, conflict, and security studies and to better inform the policies and programs that directly shape these individuals’ lives.
Populations Engaged:
1. Former combatants from non-state armed groups
2. Former members of cartels and other transnational criminal organizations
3. Former affiliates of violent extremism groups
4. Former smugglers
5. Veterans of the state armed forces