The ecologies of DDR and transitional justice in Sierra Leone: seeing peacebuilding as a complex adaptive system

Measures of transitional justice do not operate in a vacuum. They comprise an element of larger, intersecting and interacting peace-making and peacebuilding systems, implemented in the journey from war to peace. This study examines and uncovers the complex interactions between transitional justice and DDR, through the empirically illustrative case of the TRC and DDR programs implemented in Sierra Leone. A small body of scholarship on the nexus between transitional justice and DDR has begun to crystallise. This work has importantly highlighted the space for interaction between these processes, calling attention to the risks that accompany their often simultaneous implementation, the space for competition between them and the influence they exert on one another. The need to view transitional justice as part of a larger complex system is therefore growing. Yet, significant conceptual and empirical lacunae remain. This nascent body of work that advances an ecological approach towards investigating transitional justice and DDR largely neglects the promise of complementarity between them and is heavily biased towards DDR, focusing predominantly on the ways in which transitional justice can and does affect DDR, without grounded consideration of the bi-directionality of impacts. This study addresses these current gaps and contributes empirical and conceptual nuance to this emerging interdisciplinary scholarship. Drawing on insights from the recognition of complex adaptive systems, and through a contextualised and empirical examination of the TRC and DDR processes in Sierra Leone, this study makes several contributions. We illuminate the potential for complementarity between transitional justice and DDR, particularly along the dimensions of reconciliation and reintegration. We highlight the need to dismantle inadequate normative and institutional assumptions around transitional justice and DDR beneficiaries as distinct populations, by evidencing the critical though hitherto neglected role that ex-combatants play, as necessary participants in both. Lastly, we demonstrate the bi-directionality of impacts between DDR and transitional justice, by empirically showcasing the impacts of DDR on transitional justice. Drawing on primary interview data with ex-combatants, this study advances an empirically driven qualitative argument for the need to view, understand and assess measures of transitional justice within the larger complex systems in which they operate. DDR and transitional justice, often implemented simultaneously, yet with little institutional regard for their co-existence, together contour the landscape of societies transitioning from war to peace.