War Veterans in Postwar Situations: Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru, and Côte d’Ivoire

296 Pages·2012·2.403 MB·English

by  Nathalie Duclos (eds.)

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War Veterans in Postwar Situations: Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru, and Côte d’Ivoire
edited by Nathalie Duclos
War Veterans in Postwar
Situations
Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey,
Peru, and Côte d’Ivoire
Edited by
Nathalie Duclos
WAR VETERANS IN POSTWAR SITUATIONS
Copyright © Nathalie Duclos, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-34135-7
All rights reserved.
First published in French in 2010 as L ’adieu aux armes? Parcours d’anciens
combattants by Editions Karthala SAS, Paris, France.
First published in English in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-34417-8 ISBN 978-1-137-10974-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137109743
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
War veterans in postwar situations : Chechnya, Serbia, Turkey, Peru,
and Cote d'Ivoire / edited by Nathalie Duclos.
pages cm.—(The sciences po series in international relations and
political economy)
1. Disarmament—Case studies. 2. Armed Forces—Demobilization—
Case studies. 3. Veterans—Social conditions—Case studies. 4. Postwar
reconstruction—Case studies. 5. Peace-building—Case studies.
I. Duclos, Nathalie.
JZ5588.W36 2012
305.9(cid:2)0697—dc23 2011050342
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C O N T E N T S
Preface v ii
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Introduction: Rethinking the Former Combatants’
Return to Civilian Life 1
By Nathalie Duclos
Part 1 Veterans’ Habitus of War, Brutalization
of Societies?
One A “Chechen Syndrome”? Russian Veterans of the
Chechen War and the Transposition of War Violence
to Society 25
Anne Le Huérou and Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski
Two The Return of the Conscripts—A Vector for the
Construction of a National Security Regime in Turkey? 53
Sümbül Kaya
Three Reintegrating Civilian Life after Combat: Between
Invisibility and Resistance. The Experience of the
Ronderas in Peru 73
Camille Boutron
Four P aramilitary Demobilization and the Return of
Violence in Colombia 95
Sophie Daviaud
Part 2 Process of Reintegration, Cultural
Demobilization?
Five A Veteran’s Challenge: From the Test of War to the
American Dream 1 17
Béatrice Richard
Six T he Position of Former Combatants, French
Authorities, and Public Opinion Vis-à-Vis German
Prisoners of War (1944–1949) 1 37
Fabien Théofilakis
vi Contents
Seven T he “Recycled” Militiaman: An Examination of the
Postwar Reconversion of Four Former Members of a
Serbian Armed Group 157
S amuel Tanner
Eight M useveni’s Best Enemies: Dilemmas and Political Uses
of the Reintegration of Former Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA) Commanders in Northern Uganda 177
S andrine Perrot
Part 3 From Military Combat to Political Struggle:
Reconversion or Continuity?
Nine From the Great War to Democracy: Former Combatants
and the Sardinian Autonomist Movement 2 01
Christophe Roux
Ten The Postwar Period in Chechnya: When Spoilers
Jeopardize the Emerging Chechen State (1996–1999) 2 19
Aude Merlin
Eleven A “Warrior” Generation? Political Violence and
Subjectivation of Young Militamen in Ivory Coast 241
R ichard Banégas
Conclusion 267
N athalie Duclos
Bibliography 273
C ontributors 287
I ndex 291
P R E F A C E
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Yale University
The end of the Cold War is associated with a significant shift in the way
in which civil wars end. In the past, internal conflicts tended to end in
decisive military victories, even when they lasted for a long time; nowa-
days, negotiated settlements between the warring parties, often facilitated,
supervised, and financed by supranational institutions or international
actors tend to be much more common than in the past. In the context
of such settlements, the demobilization and reintegration of combatants
becomes a central issue, one intimately related to both policy design and
the theoretical understanding of concepts such as conflict and postconflict,
violence, and peace. More specifically, the challenges posed by processes
of transition from conflict to postconflict contexts are numerous and can
be articulated most productively when arrayed around three related levels
of analysis.
At the macro level, it is essential to understand the goals of the vari-
ous actors involved in the conflict. For example, did they seek a social
transformation of their society or just access to power for its own sake?
Did they claim to represent the entire nation or particular social or ethnic
groups? Given that civil wars take place primarily in poor countries, the
transition away from conflicts calls for three intertwined giant projects:
state-building, which entails the extension of state capacity to a state’s
entire territory, both in terms of security but also in terms of regional
integration; national-building, which calls for the forging of a common
identity and the introduction of representative institutions; and sustain-
able economic development. These projects are daunting in and of them-
selves; when undertaken together, they can easily undermine each other,
generating a host of negative externalities.
At the meso level, it becomes necessary to pay close attention to the
structure of the organizations that took part in the conflict. Were they
cohesive or fragmented? Centralized or not? How exactly were their
members recruited and socialized? What kind of relations did they main-
tain with the civilian population? How did they rule over it? Crucially,
one must explore the dynamics of the war and the modalities of violence
viii Preface
that took place. Unless we understand these processes it becomes very dif-
ficult to figure out whether it is preferable for demobilized combatants to
abandon their former networks or remain embedded in them. Consider a
common conundrum: on the one hand, it is extremely difficult to inte-
grate atomized former combatants in a society that often treats them with
disdain if not with outright vengefulness; however, the social embedded-
ness of these combatants into their former networks may facilitate both
their remobilization (and, therefore, the possibility of a recurrence of the
conflict) and the “organizational hijacking” of these networks into crimi-
nal activities. Clearly, “one model fits all” approaches to these issues are
destined to fail, as are simplistic frameworks of the “new wars” kind.
Lastly, at the micro level, the focus must be on both the experiences of
individual combatants and individual civilians. Questions of brutalization
and traumatization should be investigated extensively, and the long-term
effects of war on political and social behavior and identities calls for care-
ful research. One of the most important insights of recent research on
civil wars points to the “endogenous” effects of conflict: when exiting a
conflict, individuals and communities do not revert to the status quo ante;
they have been fundamentally transformed by the experience of conflict.
Exactly how, is a question that to this day has not been investigated sys-
tematically. Clearly, the policies that are recommended or implemented
must take into account explicitly the effects of conflict. This set of con-
siderations must also be incorporated in debates of reconciliation and his-
torical memory.
This brief overview suggests how difficult it is to trace the multiple
paths available to former combatants during the transition from conflict
to postconflict and, therefore, how challenging it is to design sensible
policies. With its comparative and historical focus and its bold emphasis
on combatants, W ar Veterans in Postwar Situations is a welcome contribution
to the study of processes of demobilization and reintegration. Its original-
ity is two-fold. First, it attempts to bridge the gap between present policy
and past experience by stressing the historical and cultural modalities of
the process of combatant “return” and reintegration. Second, by fully rec-
ognizing that war transforms society, all the way from individual brutal-
ization to organizations and networks, and by placing this transformation
squarely into the broader political and social context, it successfully inte-
grates the micro, meso, and macro levels. In doing so, and in combining
a subtle historical and contextual understanding of specific experiences
with a broad comparative and theoretical perspective, this book marks a
decisive improvement in our understanding of a problem at once vexing
and fascinating.
Introduction: Rethinking the Former
Combatants’ Return to Civilian Life
Nathalie Duclos
Abstract
The introduction examines research in the fields of history,
political science, sociology, and anthropology concerning combat
veterans of various armed conflicts, within and between states.
Two research methodologies emerge which, though developed
independently of each other, reflect a preoccupation with similar
questions. The author proposes a third methodology, reformulat-
ing these questions in the aim of laying the groundwork for a
political sociology of the ex-combatant’s return to civilian life and
their postwar trajectories. Critical of the view that the end of a war
opens up a radically new era, the author suggests taking a closer
look at the legacies of war, its postwar sociological and cognitive
continuities and discontinuities, the possible difficulties involved
in ex-combatants ridding themselves of a violent “mode,” the
effects, from that point of view, of policies aimed at them, and the
strategies of individual veterans facing the deep sociological and
political transformations of the postwar period. The career con-
cept proposed by Howard Becker certainly helps to better under-
stand and deal with ex-combatants’ postwar itineraries.
This book constitutes an approach to a subject more prominent in
Anglophone political science than in France and Francophone research.
Our aim, in this comparative and multidisciplinary discussion of postcon-
flict periods following a cease-fire, armistice, or signing of a peace plan,
is to focus on the trajectories of the main actors in these conflicts, i.e.,
the ex-combatants—recruits called up for service, volunteers mobilized
in an armed struggle movement, or combatants enlisted by force in an