Linking and Co-ordinating DDR and SSR for Human Security after Conflict: Issues, Experience and Priorities. Thematic Working Paper 2.

Abstract

Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes for ex-combatants have become an important component of many, if not most, post-conflict stabilisation, peace-building and recovery programmes over the 15 – 20 years. They are specifically focussed on ‘ex-combatants’, a category which for DDR purposes includes direct ex-combatants and those closely associated with them including spouses, ‘camp followers’ and dependents. The experience with DDR has provided many lessons. International standards and good-practice guidelines for DDR have become relatively highly elaborated in recent years. The UN Integrated Disarmament, Demobilisation and Re-Integration Standards (IDDRS) represent the fullest expression of this, composed of some 800 pages of detailed guidance to practitioners, as distilled by a special UN Inter-Agency Working Group and the work of dozens of international experts.1 Such standards are recently developed, and their adoption and usefulness has yet to be fully tested. One overall aim of this project is to critically examine the understandings informing such standards, and clarify how they may be revised or developed. It is clear that there are continuing problems in practice. For example, several recent UN-mandated DDR programmes have seriously struggled to establish an effective focus, and have in some cases had to be re-launched several times. Haiti and Southern Sudan provide two examples of this. Part of the problem is that DDR programmes are continuing to be mandated as if they can in themselves address much of a war-torn country’s post-conflict security building needs. In fact, DDR needs to be co-ordinated with a range of other post-conflict security building programmes, including Security Sector Reform (SSR), wider arms collection and management programmes, transitional justice, peace-building and reconciliation processes. DDR needs to be one of several peace and security-building programmes, all co-ordinated within the overall framework of a broad peace-building and recovery strategy and process.