Beyond Fighting and Returning: Social Navigations of Former Combatants in Central Mozambique

Abstract

This dissertation provides an analysis of the war and postwar social navigations of ex-Renamo combatants in central Mozambique. It critically reflects on the notion of "reintegration of ex-combatants" and on what is often called the “recipient community.” All too often ex-combatants’ life trajectories are understood in terms of ruptures: a break with society upon recruitment and a break with the past upon return to civilian life. Such a conception underlines the role of war violence in ex-combatants’ trajectories and thereby obscures other processes and relationships. Furthermore, it offers a rather simplistic understanding of the “community” to which veterans return. This dissertation combines the notion of social navigation with a cultural model approach, which taken together provide a novel way to explore veterans' trajectories, in which war is conceived not as an aberration of social life but as a social condition among others. Three main arguments are developed in this dissertation. The first is that Renamo veterans’ war and postwar navigations are shaped not only by the perpetration of, and need to deal with, violence, but also, and perhaps predominantly, by envisioned and culturally scripted “life projects,” which include marriage, maintaining good relationships with ancestral spirits, and achieving a big man status, among others. Second, Renamo veterans’ navigations are best understood as comprising a mixture of ruptures and continuities of relationships and networks throughout the war and post-war period. And third, the “community” in which reintegration is supposed to happen must be seen as an open, heterogeneous, and conflict-ridden context, embroiled in war and postwar conflicts and frictions, and simultaneously shaped by its specific local history. The dissertation’s perspective is also valuable outside the Mozambican context, as it allows one to paint a more nuanced picture of combatants as not merely violent actors and perpetrators (or in the case of child soldiers, victims) who need to leave “their past behind” in order to “reintegrate” into “society,” but also as social beings enmeshed in a variety of relationships that profoundly shape their postwar trajectories. Such a perspective may lead to a focus on how violence problematizes matters of marriage, livelihood, childcare, relationship with ancestral spirits, and so on, and how people go about realizing such life projects in socially differentiated and culturally specific ways. By focusing on continuities rather than breaks and on social struggles rather than violence, and by considering ex-combatants as social navigators, this dissertation demonstrates how ethnographic studies can contribute to debates about the reintegration of former combatants.