Johanna Söderström

Understanding the process of former combatants coming home after war is a crucial part of understanding any society’s transition toward peace. This project captures the challenges and opportunities for political mobilization among former combatants as they come home from wars across the Global North and Global South. This sheds a light on how the former combatant identity shapes ongoing political involvement long after the war has ended, and thereby how the transition to peace unfolds at the individual level.

How society should deal with the return of former combatants is a centuries old question. Today, UN programs across the globe are heavily involved in dealing with the return of former combatants, and questions about how to deal with the return of the veteran is also the subject of both public debate and government programs in many countries around the world. At present, the literature is largely divided between the Global South and the Global North, yet we can learn much from bridging this divide, as the process of coming home is a global phenomenon where former combatants face similar challenges irrespective of context. War is both a universal experience and a very contextual one. Not all wars are the same, and the experience of coming home after war is far from uniform. However, this project is focused on the shared meaning and process of coming home after war, across different wars and across different lives.

The project (and book) is concerned with the personal transition former combatants face and journey on after the war. This is studied through using life histories from three different wars and types of former combatants (PLAN/SWAPO independence fighters in Namibia; M-19 guerillas in Colombia; and Vietnam veterans in the USA). The project demonstrates how the process of coming home shapes their political commitment and identity, and how the legacy of war is a powerful reminder in the lives of these former combatants long after they have come home. These former combatants disarmed more than 27 years ago, and the project depicts their political life paths since. Thus, the project also forms part of the recent biographical turn in the social sciences. Taking the temporal truly serious, the project displays how the dynamics between political mobilization, identity and network vary across time in the lives of more than 50 former combatants as they move toward peace and coming home.