The impact of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes on development : livelihood revival among excombatants in Sierra Leone

Abstract

The process of disbanding armed groups and returning former fighters to civilian life has been an important component of the efforts to end civil wars in recent years. Recent peace-building efforts by the international community recognize that socio-economic cooperation among former warring parties is vital for development and reducing incentives for future violence. In this regards, an important part of a peace process is often a disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programme (DDR). Despite this recognized importance of DDR programmes in peace process, these programmes are rarely designed with an explicit awareness of its potential long term positive impact on developmental goals of societies emerging from civil wars. At the policy level these programmes are often designed to foster and sustain political stability, security and peace. At the academic level, there have been few systematic efforts focussing on how to create reliable livelihoods for demobilized fighters through DDR programmes. The interest of this study has been to investigate the impact of DDR programmes on development in post-civil war societies. In order to shade light on the relationship between DDR programmes and development, livelihoods approach is identified as an analytical framework. Since the 1990s livelihoods approach emerged as a new way of thinking in the debate regarding poverty reduction. It has been adopted by many governments, NGO’s and multi-lateral organizations for development purpose. However, livelihood approach has rarely been called upon to analyze DDR programmes in post civil conflicts societies. The negligence of the livelihood question in relation to DDR programmes is an irony because high risk of conflicts has been associated with the absence of income-earning opportunities for youth in developing countries. An initial assumption of this study was that the use of livelihood approach to guide the inception and implementation of DDR programmes has the potential to look beyond the traditional goal of DDR programmes which is usually seen as a means to achieve security and stability in a post war situation. The examination of ex-combatants’ livelihoods revival efforts made by the DDR programme in Sierra Leone reveals that there was a lack of emphasis by the programme on areas with greater potentials for durable livelihoods sources for ex-combatants such as the agricultural sector and rural re-settlement. This negligence of these areas by the programme, significantly, undermines the economic reintegration of ex-combatants in a durable manner. The analysis in this study show that the negligence of rural livelihoods among the reintegration packages is, to a large extinct, due to the absence of livelihoods approach as a guiding framework for the DDR programme.