Description
This paper engages with visualizing reintegration landscapes in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through the experiences of former child soldiers, female ex-combatants, and local communities. Specifically, it asks how everyday experiences of return challenge the wider Disarming, Demobilising and Reintegrating (DDR) discourse in civil wars and more broadly engages with the question: How to ordinary people navigate war legacies? Through visual and oral histories, the paper frames spaces where communities and ex-combatants coexist in conflict contexts and suggests examining the aftermath of war through collective spaces of repair and individual embodied spaces. In doing so, the central argument of the paper points our scholarly attention to the liminal spaces where reintegration, transitional justice, and social cohesion are experienced in the everyday by ex-combatants in their communities. By focusing on life histories, this research also shifts academic focus to those who live through the aftermath of civil wars. As a result, it shifts the research gaze to the everyday experiences of war and reintegration within communities to explore the spaces where reintegration is lived.
