Life After Insurgency: Reintegration of Ex-Combatants in Colombia

This thesis examines the trajectory of a group of ex-combatants from the FARC-EP guerrilla (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army) after the 2016 Peace Agreement, which ended 52 years of internal conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019 and 2023 in a rural settlement for reintegration, and interviews with local communities, government officials, and international practitioners, this study explores how ordinary ex-combatants imagined and experienced the reintegration process outlined in the Peace Agreement.
Conceived of by the insurgency leaders as a collective, participatory and territory-focused project, the FARC reintegration sought to maintain the insurgent group’s cohesion and to advance their political goals without arms. More than a process of re-entering mainstream society, the FARC’s reintegration was conceived of and discursively framed in their shared narrative as “the continuation of the struggle through other means”. Yet for most ordinary ex-combatants, the post-accord struggle has not been in the political arena, but in their rural sites where they have faced economic hardship, displacement and growing violence. Their lived experiences of the reintegration process have thus been marked by uncertainty and the disillusionment created by the chasm between expectations and reality. Despite this, as this thesis demonstrates, ordinary ex-combatants have crafted various mechanisms to cope with and make sense of the transition. Their differentiated trajectories have been shaped by contextual factors as well as their diverse potential, aspirations and possibilities based on education, cadre status and personal networks, indicating that there has not been one reintegration process but many.
Rather than viewing ex-combatant reintegration as a unidirectional process of transforming armed actors into peaceful citizens, my research shows that for many FARC ex-combatants, the transition out of war has involved multiple and varied transformations. These include the reconfiguration of life projects and the resignification of wartime narratives, practices and subjectivities, processes I encapsulate in the notion of re-existence. Building on critical reintegration scholarship, my thesis calls for studying reintegration settings and populations ethnographically, and to draw on the ex-combatants’ lived experiences to conceptualise reintegration as a set of multiple re-existence journeys that are shaped by, but extend beyond policies, programmes and technical interventions.