Determinants of ex-combatants’ attitudes toward transitional justice in Colombia

Abstract

This article draws on original survey data of 10,951 Colombian ex-paramilitaries to study the determinants of victimizers’ support for transitional justice. Understanding ex-combatants’ attitudes toward victims of the conflict and measures of justice is critical to gaining leverage on when transitional justice is likely to prove effective. The data suggest that former fighters’ views of transitional justice are shaped by the intimacy with which they experience transitional justice: whether they are known to, in close proximity, and accepted by the communities they victimized. Their attitudes are also constrained by the norms of justice in which they have been socialized, and by the extent of the risks to them personally: in judicial terms given their own culpability and in security terms given their vulnerability to retribution. The study has important implications for the prospects of successful transitional justice with the FARC rebels and for the consolidation of peace in Colombia.

Keywords

Civil war Colombia emotion FARC peace transitional justice violence

In contexts progressing from civil conflict to peace and from authoritarianism to democracy, transitional justice constitutes the central set of measures implemented to redress the legacies of human rights violations committed during the past war and previous regime (Kritz, 1995; McAdams, 1997). These measures, including the revelation of truth, material and symbolic reparations to victims, punishment of perpetrators, and institutional reforms, have been deemed critical to achieving inclusive and non-violent governance (Elster, 2004).

The scholarly literature has made significant advances in theorizing the political, legal, social, and ideational determinants of transitional justice mechanisms and in assessing their efficacy at promoting peace, reconciliation, and democratization (Gibson, 2004; Nalepa, 2010; Snyder and Vinjamuri, 2003; Sikkink, 2011). These works focus principally on the macro level of analysis, leaving open the question of the micro mechanisms of transitional justice, and specifically what individuals actually want in terms of justice and why their views vary. Relying on surveys and in-depth interviews, a recent scholarship has begun to fill this gap and to understand the opinions toward transitional justice of the population in general and of victims in particular (Aguilar et al., 2011; Rettberg and Ugarriza, 2016; Samii, 2013).

However, we have a surprisingly limited understanding of perpetrators and former combatants’ views and acceptance of transitional justice policies (Grossman et al., 2015). There has not been systemic evidence brought to bear on former fighters’ experiences with transitional justice. Yet ex-combatants vary significantly in their views toward victims of the conflict and methods of justice during times of transition. Moreover, it is highly intuitive, although ultimately an empirical question, that attitudes should correlate with behavior and meaningful transitional justice will become more likely when perpetrators are willing participants in the process; that is, when they believe in transitional justice rather than when they engage in it merely out of fear or to gain access to benefits. It is difficult to believe that ex-combatants unwilling to take responsibility for their acts of violence, recognize their victims’ rights, seek pardon, repair those affected by their atrocities, and accept punishment will facilitate transitional justice on a micro level. Accordingly, it is critical to understand when and why transitioning perpetrators accept the rights of their victims and hold positive views of truth, reparations, and punishment.

In this article, I present a series of hypotheses, rooted in the literatures on conflict, peace, and transitional justice, to account for variation in these attitudes. I explore data from a representative survey of 10,951 Colombian ex-combatants, which was enumerated by the Agencia Colombiana para la Reintegración (ACR) between 2007 and 2008. These data provide novel information on ex-combatants’ attitudes toward victims’ status and rights, views of different transitional justice measures, and sentiments about their own participation in the violent conflict. The survey data also provide detailed information on a variety of potential explanatory factors to account for variation in ex-combatants’ attitudes toward transitional justice.

I find that former fighters’ support of transitional justice is shaped foremost by the intimacy with which they experience transitional justice: whether they, the victimizers, are known to, in close proximity, and accepted by the communities they victimized. Their attitudes are also constrained by the form of justice in which they have been most socialized, whether civilian or military, and by the extent of the risks to them personally: in judicial terms stemming from their own culpability and in security terms given potentially vengeful victims and comrades.

This article provides the foundation for research revealing if ex-combatants’ emotional transformation as part of the transitional justice process enhances society’s resilience to the recurrence of atrocity. Are former fighters’ feelings of remorse and guilt, acceptance of victims’ rights and status, and respect for the transitional justice process a portent for whether they will return to violence as the peace literature assumes? In more general terms, does justice enhance security? Understanding ex-combatants’ attitudes toward transitional justice is the first step to gaining leverage on these questions.

The article’s insights into ex-combatants’ acceptance or rejection of transitional justice prove especially valuable right now as Colombia implements the peace accords with the FARC. Some of the variables highlighted here shed light on the ex-rebels’ likely trajectories, on whether they will meaningfully engage in transitional justice, and on how policymakers can facilitate this engagement.

In 2015, in Bojayá, FARC commander Pastor Alape orated to a gathering of victims: “We stand in front of you to express our willingness to pay tribute and honor the memory of the victims produced by this long conflict … We accept part of the blame … We are committed to the truth, recognizing the harm done … reparations … and no repetition” ( El Espectador, 2015). These symbolic reconciliatory gestures beg the question: is this talk “cheap” or do the FARC believe in its rhetoric? And critically, what explains variation in FARC combatants’ commitment to justice?

This article predicts that we should see marked sub-national and individual variation in the effectiveness of transitional justice with the FARC. Justice is likely to take hold differentially based, in part, on the nature of ex-combatant–community relations. Specifically, citizen rejection of and discrimination against ex-combatants may create vicious cycles in which ex-combatants, in turn, reject victims’ rights and prove less willing to engage in reconciliation. While Colombia views reintegration as a community-based process and seeks to create the conditions for communities to accept ex-FARC members into their midst, a large share of the population feels deep resentment toward the FARC, as evidenced by its votes in the 2016 plebiscite and 2018 legislative elections. This acrimony toward the FARC threatens to erode FARC combatants’ commitment to repairing their victims, and remaining at peace.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that transitional justice is not just a country-level phenomenon, as it has remained with the FARC to date, but that it also will become an intimate micro-level one between former victimizers and victims. Certain elements of transitional justice are more intimate than others. They may, as a result, invoke greater security threats for ex-combatants, posed both by vengeful victims and by former comrades fearful of informants. At a time when ex-FARC members have proven extremely vulnerable to retribution, safety considerations may influence their attitudes toward transitional justice and, therefore, merit further attention.

The findings suggest that there will be important dynamics unleashed by the geography of recruitment, deployment, and postwar migration of the combatants. These dynamics are temporarily on hold with the concentration process that isolates many ex-combatants from civilian communities. However, if and when the ex-combatants resettle, it will matter where they go. That FARC is administering material assistance and economic projects for the ex-rebels may keep a greater share of the ex-combatants in their zones of operation for longer. The data suggest that this will have mixed results for transitional justice. On the one hand, it will force accountability because the ex-combatants may be recognized by their victims. On the other hand, it will keep them in proximity to their victims, from whom they may fear retribution or discrimination. It will be critical to the implementation of transitional justice with the FARC to pay close attention to the important variation in the nature of the relationships between ex-combatants and non-combatants after the conflict.

The findings of this article further suggest that FARC’s decoupling of civilian and military life and degree of political indoctrination of its members into armed norms of justice may render FARC fighters less amenable to the transitional form of justice after war. Particularly at risk of rejecting transitional justice may be those that served the FARC in combatant capacities as opposed to in support roles, and child soldiers who must make a leap into a system of justice they have never learned.

This article proceeds as follows: in the next section I introduce the Colombian case of the paramilitaries and describe the system of justice that governed their transition to peace, comparing it with the system facing the FARC. In the third section I present the explanatory framework and hypotheses. I describe the data and how the variables are operationalized in the fourth section and then empirically test and discuss the results in the fifth section. To conclude, I outline several broader implications of the findings for the implementation of transitional justice and for progression to peace more generally.

Transitional justice in Colombia

Over the past five decades, violence in Colombia has swept over “desert and plain, in burning valley and Andean crags” (Bailey, 1967), leaving over 220,000 dead in its wake. It has uprooted and displaced 4.74 million. Since 1981, Colombians have suffered 23,161 assassinations and 1,982 massacres and have witnessed 27,023 kidnappings, 10,189 casualties owing to landmines, 5,016 forced disappearances, and thousands of cases of torture, rape, and forcible recruitment. The paramilitaries have been found responsible for a majority of these atrocities, which often targeted unarmed civilians, indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations, women, children, and other vulnerable members of society (Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2013). Peace bargains, signed between 2003 and 2006, led to the decommissioning of these powerful militia armies (Daly, 2016).

The transitional justice regime governing these peace processes assumed the form of the Justice and Peace Law (Law 975) (Díaz, 2007). Approved on 21 June 2005, the act aimed “to facilitate the processes of peace and individual or collective reincorporation into civilian life of the members of illegal armed groups, guaranteeing the victims’ rights to truth, justice, and reparation” (Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 2007).

This transitional justice regime dictated that individual paramilitaries guilty of crimes against humanity had to make full and honest confessions of their actions and “the objective and subjective elements that helped create the conditions and circumstances in which atrocious conduct was perpetrated” (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2004). Under Law 975, perpetrators received punishments via “alternative” sentences of five to eight years in prison, depending on the gravity of their crimes (Laplante and Theidon, 2006). Reparations took the form of restitution of assets, payment of compensation, and access to rehabilitation procedures.¹

Members of the irregular armed groups in Colombia with no pending charges of crimes against humanity fell under Law 782 of 2002, which granted them legal benefits and reinsertion assistance, and Law 1424 of 2010, which granted them liberty in exchange for full participation in the transitional justice regime.

The transitional justice regime facing the FARC—Sistema Integral de Verdad, Justicia, Reparación y no Repetición—diverges in its means, but accords with the paramilitary process in its central tenets. It seeks truth through a truth commission, reparations to victims in both material and symbolic terms, and punishment (restricted liberty) for crimes against humanity while offering amnesty for political crimes.

The survey data from which this article draws was conducted in the aftermath of the passage of Law 975. It demonstrates the marked variation in the extent to which individual Colombian ex-combatants accepted responsibility for the violence committed, sought forgiveness, and transitioned from combatant to civilian status by distancing themselves from their militant pasts and supporting transitional justice. What explains this variation?

Explaining attitudes toward transitional justice

I propose that ex-combatants’ attitudes toward transitional justice are influenced by a mixture of wartime and postwar experiences. Ex-combatants should face varying costs to accepting transitional justice based on their responsibility for the atrocities committed, degree of personal insecurity, and extent to which the transitional form of justice accords or clashes with their own norms of justice. Additionally, ex-combatants’ views of transitional justice should be shaped in important ways by their relationships with civilians and with victims: specifically, whether the ex-combatants are known to, in close proximity, and tolerated versus rejected by the communities which their armed units victimized. I outline the logic of factors related to these wartime and reintegration experiences and the mechanisms by which they are likely to influence ex-combatants’ attitudes and sentiments toward transitional justice.²

Conflict experiences

The literature on the dynamics of civil war proposes that experiences during the war, living within the structure of a rebel or militia organization, change individuals in fundamental ways. These experiences may influence individuals’ attitudes toward transitional justice. There are both individual and collective elements of war experience that may matter.

At the individual level, two factors emerge as potentially affecting attitudes toward victims of the conflict and rights to justice for those victims: (1) ex-combatants’ individual involvement in violence; and (2) the extent to which the ex-combatant was indoctrinated into the norms of justice within a belligerent group. Former fighters’ willingness to assume responsibility for the harm committed may be related to their individual level of culpability and self-assessment of that culpability. The repertoire and extent of violence experienced also has been found to be associated with psychological trauma (Grossman, 1995) and a series of emotions—shame, anger or depression—that may relate to ex-combatants’ sentiments toward the war and the victims of the war (Annan et al., 2011; Petersen and Daly, 2010).

The second factor—socialization into the norms of war—may render violence a normal part of everyday life and victimhood an inevitable part of that life (Darby, 2001). Recent research has demonstrated the importance of socialization in accounting for a variety of outcomes, including strong variation in repertoires of violence (Wood, 2009). Combatants who are recruited as children or young adults and who spend a large share of their lives within the constraints of an illegal structure may know only the armed norms of justice propagated by the belligerent group (Beber and Blattman, 2013). These individuals may have difficulty transitioning to the systems of justice of civilian society and may possess less favorable views of transitional justice.

The impact of conflict experiences on postwar attitudes, however, should be mediated by the nature of one’s armed group. Warring factions carry out varying levels of atrocities (Kalyvas, 2006; Weinstein, 2007). Individual ex-combatants may be influenced not only by their own participation in violence but also by that of their collective structures. Armed groups also vary in their statutes regulating the use of violence and vary in the extent of their indoctrination and training (Hoover Green, 2011). Where these groups support or permit violations of humanitarian law either formally or informally, their ex-combatants are socialized into a moral code that may render them hostile to transitional justice.

A prominent literature on armed organizations during war finds that the behavior of armed groups endowed with natural resource wealth is “predicted to exhibit much higher levels of indiscriminate violence, looting, and destruction” (Weinstein, 2007: 216). Accordingly, individuals who belonged to such groups may be collectively responsible for elevated levels of atrocity and may therefore hold unfavorable views of transitional justice. At the same time, resource-rich groups also tend to engage in less indoctrination, generating a weaker code of conduct governing individual behavior (Weinstein, 2007). In this sense, members of more criminal, as opposed to ideological, groups may prove less socialized into armed norms of justice.

Reintegration experiences

The literature on conflict and peace has found that conflict experiences are not the only determinants of postwar attitudes toward policies. Ex-combatants’ experiences with reintegration and the broader context in which they live post-conflict should structure their views of victims of the armed conflict. While there exist many contextual factors that may matter, the nature of individual ex-combatants’ relationships with their local communities should help structure their policy positions.

After demobilizing, ex-combatants experience rejection, resistance, tolerance or endorsement by the civilian communities in which they reside. Where supported by the population, ex-combatants should prove more willing to come forward to claim responsibility for their past actions.

Relations with the civilian population are partially influenced by the nature of the former combatants’ postwar migration. After demobilizing, some former fighters choose to remain in the zone in which they operated militarily whereas others choose to move far from their conflict environment (Daly, 2016). Individuals who remain in the region in which they or their armed group committed violence may be more easily recognized by victims and therefore forced to face their militant pasts. At the same time, they may fear their victims’ vengeance and therefore prove less willing to admit to their crimes; transitional justice policies are more personal in such localities and may have negative consequences for their safety (Aguilar et al., 2011). Individuals who remain postwar where they deployed also do not change social milieus and may have a harder time transitioning from victimizer to civilian status, rendering them less likely to support transitional justice (Daly et al., 2014). In contrast, ex-combatants who migrate either to new localities or home to neighborhoods unaware of their participation in an armed group are likely better able to move on from their violent pasts and “disappear” into civilian life as anonymous individuals, blending into the social fabric of migrants, displaced persons, and impoverished residents. In this way, they may more easily escape their victims. Physically removed from their victims and their pasts, they may prove more likely to acknowledge and more willing to make reparation to those victims (Daly, 2011).

A further contextual factor involves the security situation in the locality in which the ex-combatant resides (Weintraub et al., 2015). Just as transitional justice becomes more likely on a macro, country level as security and peace become consolidated and the trade-off between security and justice becomes mitigated, on a micro level, a similar dynamic may be at play. Fear for one’s security may reduce support for transitional justice, especially if the source of insecurity lies with vengeance killings by victims or punishment for informing by former collaborators and armed colleagues.

While evidence is mixed, exposure to reintegration programming should also have an impact on ex-combatants and should influence their attitudes toward transitional justice (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2007). Reintegration programs seek to reintegrate fighters into civilian life. An important part of this transition involves socializing the ex-fighters back into the moral codes of society. The account of a reintegration psychologist speaks to this goal:

Many ex-combatants are proud of their crimes when they demobilize. They do not feel guilty about them at all because they have not been taught normal values. But as they engage in the social–psychological workshops, they begin to feel more guilt … the reintegration and reconciliation programs teach the former combatants what emotions they are supposed to feel.³

Data

In the next sections, I probe the explanatory leverage of each of these factors with data from a representative ex-combatant survey of 10,951 former paramilitaries across Colombia. The survey asked, among other things, about the ex-combatants’ wartime and reintegration experiences, their political attitudes, and the conditions under which they deemed a return to violence justifiable.

The sample frame was all ex-paramilitaries in Colombia participating in the ACR programming at the time of the survey. The ACR administered monthly stipends, schooling, training, and psychological and social aid to a large majority of the demobilized individuals at 40 Service Centers.⁴ Each ex-combatant was assigned to a tutor (psychologist), with no more than 120 former fighters per tutor. The tutores conducted house visits to every ex-combatant (and their families) once per month to track their reintegration. Additionally, they carried out weekly workshops with the program’s beneficiaries. These tutores conducted the survey. On the one hand, their relationships with the ex-combatants could have intensified social desirability bias because the ex-fighters wished to please those helping facilitate their transition. On the other hand, the tutores had established relationships of rapport and trust with the ex-paramilitaries, potentially mitigating social desirability bias. Additionally, the tutores were trained as social workers and psychologists and were therefore well suited to interview this vulnerable population. They enjoyed access to nearly the entire population of demobilized ex-combatants. The numbers of ex-combatants in the sample were proportionate to the number of ex-combatants in each ex-paramilitary group.⁵

Measuring transitional justice

Following the approach of Aguilar el al. (2011), I operationalize attitudes toward transitional justice using different survey questions.

Public apology

For attitudes about accepting responsibility for the crimes committed, ex-combatants were asked: “Do you believe it is important for the demobilized combatants to publicly acknowledge the harm they caused civilians?” The response categories were binary: yes or no.

Victims’ status and rights

For attitudes regarding the violence perpetrated and victims’ rights, individuals were asked, “What do you think about the civilians that suffered injuries and/or were killed at the hands of the armed groups?” By focusing on civilians, this question differentiated between attacks on armed, uniformed soldiers and those on unarmed civilians as codified in International Humanitarian Law. I created an ordinal variable from seven response categories that captured whether the ex-combatant believed that victims deserved transitional justice or not. This variable assumes a value of “0” if the respondent deemed the harm to civilians to have been necessary or inevitable or that the victims were not innocent or had had bad luck. The variable assumes a value of “2” if the respondent believed that victims should receive economic reparations, symbolic reparations, and/or an apology. The variable is coded “1” if the ex-combatant expressed a mixture of support and for opposition to victims’ rights.

Emotions about participation in an armed group

For attitudes toward their past involvement in the armed conflict, respondents were asked: “When you recall your participation in the armed group, what emotions do you experience most frequently?” Based on the 10 response categories, I created a scale, coded “0” for positive sentiments about their participation in the war, “1” for sentiments of indifference, and “2” for negative sentiments about their participation. Positive sentiment response categories included pride, sadness for having left the armed group, and a conviction that the former combatants deserved recognition (i.e. medals of honor) for their participation in the war. Response options of indifference included that they “felt nothing” or “did not think about their participation.” Negative sentiments about their participation included emotions of sadness for having participated, shame, anguish, and guilt.

Measuring explanatory variables

To test the hypotheses, I include two groups of independent variables in the analyses: (1) a set of independent variables that capture the individuals’ conflict experiences; and (2) a set that proxies for their reintegration experiences.

Conflict experiences

Individual and collective culpability

I expect individuals who themselves committed acts of violence to prove more reluctant to support transitional justice. To protect the physical and judicial safety of the respondents, subjects were not asked any questions which could have potentially incriminated them or risked their security. Accordingly, they were not asked directly about their individual involvement in specific violent acts. To capture individual culpability, I use survey measures of rank and roles/responsibilities during the war. Certain positions within the armed structures rendered individuals more likely to employ acts of violence as part of their job descriptions. Those of higher rank were more likely to be accountable for the atrocities committed. I constructed a variable, Combatant, which assumes a value of “1” if the ex-fighter reported his/her responsibilities in the organization to have involved combat duties (patrol, foot soldier, command) and “0” if s/he described serving in a support capacity (informant, nurse, financier, logistician, or cook). I include a variable, Commander, which captures if the individual held the rank of top or mid-tier leadership or had subordinates under his/her command. For collective culpability and membership in a group that employed elevated levels of violence, I examined atrocities committed by the respondent’s armed faction (bloque), based on municipal-level violent-event data compiled by Centro de Estudios Sobre Desarrollo Económico (Sánchez, 2013).

Armed norms of justice

It is expected that individuals who were less indoctrinated into armed norms, or who belonged to groups with codes of conduct that disciplined the use of atrocities, would be more likely to support transitional justice. To measure individuals’ socialization into wartime norms of justice, I include a variable measuring how long the individuals belonged to an armed faction and a variable capturing at what age they entered a belligerent group. To proxy for the norms of justice within the respondents’ armed unit and its extent of indoctrination, I use two measures. The first captures whether the individuals belonged to an armed group that was more criminal or more political in nature, recognizing that the line between the two is blurry. For this variable, I rely on the coding by experts from the Organization of American States Peace Mission, Colombian High Commission for Peace, and Organization of International Migration who were present at the peace negotiations and who possessed intimate knowledge of the armed groups. I asked these experts to code each armed organization as economically driven (narco) or politically/ideologically driven (self-defense/counterguerrilla). As a second indicator, I examine whether the individual belonged to an armed group that was resource-rich. For this variable, I use the number of hectares of drugs cultivated in the group’s region of operation in the year prior to demobilization. These drug data derive from the reports of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Colombian National Police’s Integrated Illicit Crops Monitoring System.

Reintegration experiences

As a second set of variables, I include indicators that proxy for the ex-combatants’ reintegration experiences.

Community acceptance

It is expected that ex-combatants’ support for transitional justice will be related to their relationships with their civilian communities. I constructed a variable, Civilian Support, from the ex-combatant survey data, which captures ex-combatants’ own perceptions of how they were viewed by their communities. This measure assumes a value of “0” if the former fighters believed they were viewed with contempt, fear, distrust, resentment, or rejection by their neighbors. It assumes a value of “2” if they perceived their communities’ sentiments toward them to be characterized as appreciation, confidence, gratitude, or acceptance. Finally, the variable is coded “1” if the ex-combatants believed that members of their communities viewed them with indifference or with a mixture of these negative and positive sentiments.

Anonymity

I anticipate whether or not individuals reintegrated where they operated militarily to influence their attitudes toward transitional justice. I use two measures of anonymity. The first is whether the individuals’ postwar place of residence corresponded with their zone of wartime deployment. To operationalize this variable, I employed survey data on where each ex-combatant resided postwar. From the survey data, I also determined to which paramilitary organization each individual belonged. Next, I gathered municipality-level information on each armed group’s zones of operation at the time of demobilization. Experts often contest these mappings, so I triangulated information from three different classified sources: Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación, Justice and Peace Division, which generated these data using the confidential testimonies of 2,700 former top and mid-ranking paramilitary commanders; the Colombian High Commissioner for Peace; and the Organization of American States Peace Mission; plus one open source, the “Verdad Abierta” project. Merging these sources of information with the survey data, I was able to estimate whether the ex-combatants resided where they had deployed during the war. As a second indicator of anonymity, I examine the survey question, “Do members of your neighborhood or community know that you are a former combatant?” I coded those who answered in the affirmative, “1,” and those who answered negatively, “0.”

Security threats

To capture the security context in the locality in which the ex-combatants resided postwar, I use per-capita homicide rates at the time of demobilization from the CEDE datasets.

DDR program exposure

Finally, I expect a positive relationship between the extent of exposure to disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programming and support for transitional justice. To calculate the length of each ex-combatant's participation in the DDR program, I use ACR administrative data 2003–2007.

The empirical analyses also include several individual-level controls: gender, age, marital status, level of education at the time of demobilization, and type of demobilization process (individual or collective).

Empirical analysis

Figures 1 –3 show the distribution of the responses to the different items constituting the three dependent variables: attitudes toward a public apology; attitudes toward victims’ rights; and attitudes toward participation in the armed conflict.

Figure 1.

Support for public recognition by ex-combatants of the harm done to civilians.

Figure 2.

Attitudes toward victims’ status and rights to transitional justice.

Figure 3.

Attitudes to participation in an armed group.

These figures indicate that Colombian ex-paramilitaries were generally supportive of transitional justice. However, there exists important variation. Eighteen percent of ex-combatants did not support public acknowledgment of the atrocities. Twenty-seven percent did not accept their victims’ status and rights while an additional 20% expressed mixed support for their victims’ rights. Ten percent expressed no sentiments of remorse for their participation in violence; and 41% expressed indifference about their participation.

Table 1 shows the results of the logistic regression analyses for the dependent variable of support for the transitional justice method of public acknowledgment. Table 2 shows the results of ordered probit analyses of the dependent variable of support for victims’ status and rights. Table 3 tests the determinants of ex-combatants’ emotions about their participation in the armed conflict, and specifically the extent of their remorse using ordered probit regression. In Tables 1 –3, Models 1 and 2 include only conflict experience factors (Model 1 explores culpability; Model 2 analyzes armed norms of justice) whereas Model 3 examines only reintegration experience factors. Model 4 tests the fully specified model.

Table 1.

Logit regressions: Determinants of support for ex-combatants’ public recognition of harm done to victims

Variables	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Commander rank	−0.28*			−0.12
Commander rank	(0.14)			(0.15)
Combatant role	0.00			−0.04
Combatant role	(0.07)			(0.07)
Violence committed	−0.00***			−0.00**
Violence committed	(0.00)			(0.00)
Age entered armed group		0.06**		0.04
Age entered armed group		(0.03)		(0.03)
Duration in armed group		0.07*		0.08*
Duration in armed group		(0.04)		(0.04)
Ideological group		0.00		0.00
Ideological group		(0.05)		(0.05)
Resource-rich group		−0.00**		−0.00
Resource-rich group		(0.00)		(0.00)
Recognized as ex-combatant			0.47***	0.45***
Recognized as ex-combatant			(0.06)	(0.06)
Civilian support			0.31***	0.29***
Civilian support			(0.05)	(0.05)
Security threats			0.00	0.00***
Security threats			(0.00)	(0.00)
DDR program exposure			0.12	0.16
DDR program exposure			(0.29)	(0.29)
Reintegrated in zone of operation			−0.21***	−0.24***
			(0.06)	(0.06)
Constant	1.18***	0.91***	−0.05	−0.04
Constant	(0.12)	(0.12)	(0.62)	(0.58)
Observations	10,814	10,885	10,644	10,575

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

Survey-weighted logistic regression with individual controls.

Table 2.

Ordinal probit regressions: Determinants of support for victims’ status and rights

Variables	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Commander rank	−0.07			0.00
Commander rank	(0.05)			(0.06)
Combatant role	−0.07**			−0.06**
Combatant role	(0.03)			(0.03)
Violence committed	−0.00***			−0.00***
Violence committed	(0.00)			(0.00)
Age entered armed group		0.05***		0.04***
Age entered armed group		(0.01)		(0.01)
Duration in armed group		−0.01		0.01
Duration in armed group		(0.02)		(0.02)
Ideological group		−0.00		−0.01
Ideological group		(0.02)		(0.02)
Resource-rich group		−0.00		0.00
Resource-rich group		(0.00)		(0.00)
Recognized as ex-combatant			0.06**	0.05**
Recognized as ex-combatant			(0.03)	(0.03)
Community support			0.12***	0.11***
Community support			(0.03)	(0.02)
Security threats			−0.00***	−0.00**
Security threats			(0.00)	(0.00)
DDR program exposure			0.11	0.14
DDR program exposure			(0.13)	(0.13)
Reintegrated in zone of operation			0.00	−0.01
			(0.03)	(0.03)
Cut 1	−0.63***	−0.36***	0.22	0.17
Cut 1	(0.05)	(0.06)	(0.28)	(0.28)
Cut 2	−0.09*	0.17***	0.76***	0.72***
Cut 2	(0.05)	(0.06)	0.27	0.28
Observations	10,462	10,533	10,309	10,240

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

Survey-weighted least squares with individual controls.

Table 3.

Ordered probit regressions: Determinants of emotions about participation in armed group

Variables	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
Commander rank	−0.03			−0.06
	(0.06)			(0.06)
Combatant role	0.02			0.03
	(0.03)			(0.03)
Violence committed	0.00**			0.00
	(0.00)			(0.00)
Age entered armed group		0.01		0.02**
		(0.01)		(0.01)
Duration in armed group		−0.02		−0.01
		(0.02)		(0.02)
Ideological group		−0.04*		−0.03
		(0.02)		(0.02)
Resource-rich group		−0.00		0.00
		(0.00)		(0.00)
Recognized as ex-combatant			−0.00	−0.00
			(0.03)	(0.03)
Community support			0.04	0.04
			(0.03)	(0.03)
Security threats			0.00***	0.00***
			(0.00)	(0.00)
DDR program exposure			0.18	0.18
			(0.13)	(0.13)
Reintegrated in zone of			0.03	0.03
operation			(0.03)	(0.03)
Cut 1	−0.95***	−1.01***	−0.63**	−0.56*
	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.30)	(0.31)
Cut 2	0.47***	0.41***	0.79***	0.86***
	(0.05)	(0.05)	(0.30)	(0.31)
Observations	10519	10587	10355	10289

Standard errors in parentheses.

p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

Survey-weighted least squares with individual controls.

Models 1 across all of the tables and Models 4 of Tables 1 and 2 confirm my expectations about collective culpability influencing attitudes toward transitional justice. In these models, violence committed by one’s armed group is negatively and statistically significantly correlated with support for transitional justice. The data offer mixed support for the individual culpability hypotheses. Serving in combatant roles has a negative and significant effect on attitudes toward victims’ rights and status in Table 2, Models 1–4, as anticipated. However, the variable capturing combatant roles is not significantly related to the other dependent variables. Commanders, on average, appear to have more negative attitudes toward transitional justice, although the effects are not significant by conventional standards across the models. This suggests that the talk by the leadership may, in fact, be “cheap.”

While in illegal armed factions, soldiers may be taught that committing atrocities is acceptable as a necessary means to achieve the end goals. The size of the jump back into civilian life should correlate negatively with the effectiveness of combatants’ transitional justice. Tables 1 and 2 offer some support for this logic: the older the individuals when they entered the armed group, the more likely they were to demonstrate respect for victims’ rights. This could be taken as evidence of a higher level of socialization into the norms of civilian life of which transitional justice may be deemed part. Surprisingly, the duration of one’s time in an armed group is positively related to support for ex-combatants engaging in a public apology in Table 1, Models 2 and 4, although only at the 10% significance level. Duration in an armed group has no impact on the other dependent variables.

An interesting result is that belonging to a more political paramilitary faction renders ex-combatants less likely to express remorse for their participation in the armed conflict, as shown in Table 3, Model 2. While the variable becomes insignificant when I control for reintegration experiences, the sign on the estimate remains. This may be understood as support for the idea that more political groups prove less likely to commit indiscriminate or wonton violence, but also more likely to engage in a process of socialization that indoctrinates their soldiers into understanding the violence committed during the war to be justified. Resource richness, meanwhile, appears negatively related to public apology as anticipated, but this effect disappears when I control for reintegration experiences.

Interestingly, the strongest determinants of attitudes toward transitional justice seem to lie in contextual factors relating to ex-combatants’ reintegration experiences, specifically their relations with the civilian communities in which they reside. The three indicators of these relations are all significantly related to the outcomes in Tables 1 and 2. While teasing out causality between community relations and attitudes toward transitional justice is beyond the scope of the empirical strategy pursued here, if ex-combatants believed that their communities accepted and did not reject them, they were significantly more likely to accept responsibility for the violence committed and to support reparations.

If former combatants could disappear anonymously into civilian life without being recognized as former paramilitaries, they proved less likely to support mechanisms of transitional justice. At the same time, continuing to reside postwar in the zone in which they operated proves negatively and significantly related to support for public apologies. This suggests that, on the one hand, being recognized as an ex-combatant forces accountability. This is consistent with my field observations. An ex-combatant in Tibú explained to me: “the urbanos showed their face much more, were much better known, more easily recognized. Everyone knew them … They knew people would come forward and identify them as responsible for the massacres.”⁶ On the other hand, ex-combatants who sdisplaced away from their zones of deployment were physically removed from their victims and may not have feared retribution or discrimination were they to recognize the rights of their victims, lowering the costs of doing so.⁷

These findings suggest the importance of local over national conflict dynamics and the significant variation within a single nation in terms of conflict narratives, justifications, and victim–victimizer relationships that influence attitudes toward transitional justice.

Other reintegration experiences and contextual factors exhibit more mixed results. While DDR programming may have significant effects on recidivism and reintegration, it seems to have little effect on socializing ex-combatants into civilian norms of justice.⁸ However, persistence in a DDR program could be endogenous to positive views of transitional justice. Meanwhile, the effects of the postwar security context on attitudes is mixed. Living in localities with elevated levels of insecurity appears positively related to the dependent variables in Model 4 of Table 1 and Models 2 and 4 of Table 3, whereas homicide rates are negatively correlated with support for victims’ rights in Table 2 as anticipated. Former combatants that continue to face security threats in their environment may regret their participation in the conflict. They may also support macro transitional justice methods such as a public apology, but fear more intimate forms of transitional justice given the potential security risks posed by vengeful victims or former comrades with skeletons in their closets.

Conclusion

After signing peace accords, Colombian ex-paramilitaries varied significantly in their transitions—in the extent to which they distanced themselves from their combatant pasts, accepted responsibility for the violence committed by their belligerent factions, recognized and respected the rights of their groups’ victims, sought to repair those victims through symbolical and financial reparations, truth, and punishment, and worked to prevent future victimhood by rejecting a return to violence.

The analyses in this article draw on new data on these ex-combatants’ attitudes toward transitional justice to account for this empirical variation. The findings have important implications for the post-FARC context. The findings also may have implications for ex-combatants in other settings as well. More than one million ex-combatants and their dependents participated in demobilization and reintegration programs in 20 countries in recent years (Cutter Patel et al., 2009). More research is needed which treats former combatants as active protagonists in the struggle for transitional justice in these other contexts.

Future investigation could also seek to probe the relationship between ex-combatants’ views toward transitional justice and reconciliation and peace at the micro level. “Repairing relations between victimizer and victims requires the commitment to refrain from equal or similar affronts, harm or oversight” (Mockus, 2010). Transitional justice works to guarantee peace by revealing the truth and identities of the perpetrators so they cannot destabilize the transition and by providing a collective narrative that enables a country to leave its violent past aside and progress toward a peaceful future. If either the perpetrators return to commit atrocities or the victims, unsatisfied with the justice being carried out in their name, take justice into their own hands and commit violence, the transitional justice process fails to prevent a return to the tumultuous past. Are feelings of remorse and guilt and acceptance of victims’ rights and status associated with the absence of recurrent violence and recidivism? (Cutter Patel et al., 2009). A fruitful area of investigation would reveal if ex-combatants’ transformation as part of the transitional justice process enhances society’s resilience to the recurrence of atrocity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Yin-Hsiu Chen for research assistance, the ACR for collaboration, and Roger Petersen, Thomas Flores, Juan Vargas, and participants of the Harvard Civil Conflict Workshop for helpful feedback.

Funding

I acknowledge funding from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright US Program, National Science Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, and Smith Richardson Foundation.

Notes

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