Project description
How rituals influence ex-combatants’ reintegration
Since 2021, the number of conflicts has risen to record-high levels, making reintegration of former fighters more urgent than ever. The ERC funded Com2Civ project explores an overlooked factor in this process: rituals. These shape identities during war and after demobilisation, yet their role in returning to civilian life remains poorly understood. Com2Civ will develop a theory on how rituals influence transitions from combatant to civilian identities and gather new evidence through interviews, surveys and social mapping. Working with former fighters from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines and FARC-EP in Colombia, the project aims to uncover how communities rebuild relationships after war.
Objective
In 2023, the number of conflicts reached its highest level since 1946, making it one of the most violent years on record. Many of these conflicts were recurring, suggesting that efforts to reintegrate ex-combatants from non-state groups have largely been unsuccessful. While most research on reintegration has focused on its economic and political aspects, it has overlooked the role and impact of one of the most universal activities in human social life: rituals.
The overall objective of Com2Civ is to explain how rituals influence the social reintegration of ex-combatants, both positively and negatively. To achieve this, Com2Civ has two sub-objectives: to (1) develop a theory on how rituals influence individuals’ socialization into combatant identities and, after demobilization, into civilian identities; and (2) generate new evidence on the impact of rituals on social reintegration trajectories through a novel combination of research methods.
Rituals are notoriously difficult to study and collect systematic data on. To overcome these challenges, Com2Civ adopts two strategies. First, it takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from political science, social psychology, anthropology, and gender studies. Second, it employs an innovative combination of life history interviews, surveys, and the social cartography method. These will be implemented in a participatory research design involving ex-combatants from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in the Philippines and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) in Colombia.
Importantly, Com2Civ will reveal the social-psychological mechanisms involved in combatant-to-civilian transformation processes, contributing to scientific efforts aimed at understanding the mechanisms of conflict prevention. Com2Civ results will appear in major multidisciplinary journals, advancing the field in at least four disciplines.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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0186 Oslo
Norway
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