Understanding Reintegration Experiences through the Life Histories of Former Jihadists

Combatants’ experience of historical conflict and its aftermath rarely feature in work on political violence. Alongside an emphasis on contemporary events, the terrorism studies literature is generally more concerned with organisation and strategy than lived experience. There has also been an emphasis on questions of mobilisation as opposed to disengagement and post-conflict experiences. Hence, although increasingly urgent questions are being asked about what to do about returnees from transnational conflicts, our knowledge about what informs the reintegration process is weak. Moreover, existing work on demobilisation and reintegration has tended to focus on those ‘background’ factors considered relevant to the move away from political violence. In the literature on large-scale conflict, attention is typically directed at socio-economic issues, while research on disengagement from clandestine radical groups focuses on small group processes or individual level features such as ideological commitment. While valuable, they overlook those ‘foreground’ emotional and experiential factors which inform meaning making. To deepen our knowledge of these features of reintegration, this paper explores the life history accounts of a small number of militant Islamists who fought in Bosnia and Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s. Former combatants’ life histories offer a rich source of material by which to understand reintegration and the ongoing effect of involvement in conflict down the years. These subjective interpretations are central to understanding why people move away from violence in the face of significant costs. They are also important in interpreting why they remain disengaged despite the potential barriers to reintegration, and the ongoing opportunities to respond to those factors implicated in the decision to become involved in the first place. In exploring these issues with a focus on emotion, sense-making and interaction, the paper is less concerned with developing an ‘objective’ or ‘accurate’ account of why people move away from violence. Instead it seeks to understand the subjective experience of disengagement and reintegration and the way people make sense of their choices over the life course. Based on interviews currently being carried out with former jihadists who voluntarily disengaged from historical conflicts, this paper offers a rich, qualitative account of people’s memories of leaving, how disengagement and reintegration are subjectively experienced and recalled, what the longer-term biographical effects of involvement in political violence are, and how current selves interpret former selves.