The Impact of the Collective Reincorporation of Former FARC-EP Fighters on the Local Reconstruction of the Social Fabric in Colombia

Recon­structing the social fabric is one of the greatest challenges of buil­ding peace after civil war. A central ele­ment in this process is the normali­zation of relation­ships and the reduction of mis­trust between former combatants and the popu­lation they are reinte­grating into. In the case of the ongoing peace pro­cess with the FARC-EP in Colombia, the reinte­gration of former guerrilla fighters was orga­nized as a collective process, called reincor­poration: After the signing of the peace agree­ment in late 2016, groups of demobilized FARC-EP members gathered in canton­ments in rural areas, which were initially meant to be transi­tory but which, for the most part, lasted for years and, in part, have turned into perma­nent settlements. The project, with support from the Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz (CAPAZ) Rice University and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Colombia and conducted in cooperation with Universidad del Rosario and Universidad de la Amazonia, ana­lyzes the impact of this collective reincor­poration process on the recon­struction of the social fabric at the local level. It does so by com­bining a survey and qualitative research in seven selected muni­cipalities. In an additional step, the project makes use of expert and focus-group discussions as well as corporal cartographies (corporafías) to zoom in on gender-related differences in the perspectives on, and the experiences with, the collective reincorporation process.

The project is carried out in coope­ration with the doctoral research project “From War to Peace? Impacts of Community-Based Rein­corporation of Former FARC Comba­tants on Local Security Settings”: