State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic by Louisa Lombard

Author:Louisa Lombard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

DDR rationales

In the past there were leaders enraptured by the taking of power by coup d’état in the capital, Bangui, but today the children have been initiated into rebellion which remains an incurable habit. (Alade 2015: 1)

The fatalism in this characterization might strike some as overstated. Surely the ‘habit’ of rebellion can be cured? That, after all, is the premise of international engagement in ‘post-conflict’ (or, more accurately, the in-between of ‘no peace, no war’ situations [Richards 2005]). And administering a ‘cure’ is the particular purpose of DDR programmes, which are the main institutional means of addressing the demands and desires of the people who joined rebellions. An article by a UN news agency about DDR in CAR sums up the reasoning behind these initiatives: ‘Any progress on these problems [of insecurity] depends on consolidating peace, which in turn, depends on DDR’ (IRIN 2012). Does it, though? For more than a decade (since 2004), CAR has had a DDR programme being planned or carried out. Each time rebellion has abated, new ones have emerged.

Looking at the specific effects of DDR in CAR shows a few things. One is that it has brought people into collaboration who would not otherwise have had anything to do with each other. But while they are working together, the terms of their interactions are structured by the form of the state and the segregation it imposes (‘national’ versus ‘expatriate’, ‘rebel’ versus ‘minister’). These social divisions and identity categories are not natural facts of the world; they must be produced through relationships and interaction, and DDR is a key forum for that. The divisions are in part created from the fact that access to resources and information is not equally shared (and in particular, access to information about resources is not equally shared), but no clear hierarchy emerges from this. All players have advantages and leverage in relation to the others, and prefer to see someone else as the problematic ‘boss’. The consequences of any DDR ‘failure’ are not borne equally, however. DDR staffers receive their salaries no matter what; armed group members might not be so lucky.

So while DDR is supposed to be a different way of doing politics – and indeed, it mobilizes new resources and people for the purpose of addressing rebels’ grievances over the paucity of entitlements available – it becomes yet another instance of the promissory politics ‘the state’ generally subjects them to. By promissory politics, I mean the use of promises about future agency-generated welfare to demonstrate authority without assuming direct personal responsibility for people’s plights or otherwise giving them any direct means to claim entitlements (such as by fundamentally dismantling hierarchies between the promiser and the person to whom the promise is made). Promissory politics is the main mode in which Central African elites (ministers and the like) engage with their ostensible constituents, especially those separated by long distances made all the longer by poor roads and little transport.

After the Cold War, DDR quickly became a standard aspect of internationally brokered peace agreements.

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