DDR and Transitional Justice Valledupar, Colombia, March 2008. Demobilized paramilitaries of the AUC create murals as a component of the reintegration program. Photo by Ana Patel. While programs for the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants are not new, they have never been designed or implemented with an explicit awareness of their relationship with transitional justice measures such as:
With resolution of conflict now widely seen as inextricably linked with efforts to redeem the claims of justice, there is a clear need to examine the many ways in which DDR programs can contribute to, or hinder, the achievement of justice-related aims. Similarly, without coordinating reintegration and vetting policies, ex-combatants can be vetted from the security forces and later reinserted into the very same, or transformed, forces. Such reintegration of human rights abusers reduces trust in public institutions.
These studies formed the basis for an authors' workshop in July 2006 In its second phase, thematic studies were commissioned on subjects such:
A meeting for thematic paper authors was held in May 2007. The results of this project will appear in the third volume in the Advancing Transitional Justice series co-published by the ICTJ and the Social Science Research Council in 2008. In 2006, the unit offered input on the topic of social and economic reintegration of combatants in Mindinao and addressed the Advisory Board of the World Bank's Multi-Country Demobilization and Reintegration Program (MDRP). In June 2007, the unit presented a paper on DDR and Transitional Justice at a conference organized by the United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Africa that took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some of the first material from this project was published in 2008. Ana Patel published a chapter entitled "DDR and Transitional Justice" in the book Security and Post-Conflict Reconstruction: Dealing with Fighters in the Aftermath of War (Routledge, 2008). In addition, Pablo de Greiff published the chapter "DDR and Reparations: Establishing Links Between Peace and Justice" in Building a Future on Peace and Justice (Springer, 2009). The ICTJ is working with the UN DPKO to provide a module for the UN's Integrated DDR Standards on transitional justice. A draft has been approved and is now being reviewed by the United Nations DDR Working Group which is to be finished in the summer of 2009.
(Updated January 2009) |












