Navigating Everyday Legacies of War: Reintegration and Transitional Justice as Spaces of Repair in conflict-affected landscapes

This paper engages with visualising reintegration landscapes in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through the experiences of former child soldiers, female ex-combatants, and resident communities. Specifically, it asks how everyday experiences of return challenge wider Disarming, Demobilising and Reintegrating (DDR) discourse in civil wars and points to its dialogue with transitional justice (TJ) in conflict-affected spaces. More broadly, the paper engages with the question: How do ordinary people navigate war’s aftermath? Through visual and oral histories of reintegration and return in the DRC and CAR, the paper frames spaces where communities and ex-combatants co-exist in conflict contexts and suggest examining the aftermath of war through embodied and collective spaces of repair. In doing so the central argument of the paper points our scholarly gaze to the boundaries beyond which reintegration, transitional justice, and social cohesion are situated in the everyday by local communities. By focusing on life histories, this research also shifts academic focus to those who live through the legacy and aftermath of civil wars. And thus, it shifts the research gaze to the everyday experiences of war and reintegration among communities to explore the spaces where reintegration is lived.