ABSTRACT
Efforts to demobilize armed factions and reintegrate individual fighters into civilian life – the latter two elements of DDR programmes – are a central component of multidimensional peacekeeping operations (Berdal 1996). But despite the confidence of policy-makers in the impact of these efforts, there have been few systematic efforts to evaluate whether these programmes actually work. The literature is full of ‘lessons-learned’ assessments that attempt to parse the factors that account for the success (or failure) of a given DDR programme.2
Surprisingly, however, this debate has typically been carried out without an appropriate source of variation in the key explanatory variables. At the macrolevel, studies of DDR have typically not engaged in a comparison of outcomes in countries that did and those that did not receive interventions. At the microlevel, many studies fail to examine why some individuals and not others are able to successfully reintegrate after conflict and whether participation in DDR programmes accounts for this variation. In the absence of this kind of systematic comparison, however, it is difficult to answer the key counterfactual question: how different would things have been in the absence of these interventions?
