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Backgrounder: Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) in Africa

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Stephanie Hanson, Copy Editor
February 16, 2007

The proliferation of UN peacekeeping operations coincides with an increase in UN-led programs to disarm and disband warring parties, as well as reintegrate ex-combatants into civilian life. “Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration,” or DDR programs as they are known to practitioners, have featured in post-conflict reconstruction from Afghanistan to Haiti. But the bulk of DDR interventions—twenty-four since 1992—have occurred in Africa. The failure of early DDR programs in Somalia and Liberia, partly attributed to their vague mandates, prompted a shift in recent years toward more focused interventions, now codified in a new set of policy guidelines developed in 2005. Newer DDR programs in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have disarmed hundreds of thousands of combatants, but experts say these programs remain poorly funded, and a lack of research has prevented practitioners from developing better reintegration programs.

Administering DDR programs

A number of agencies administer DDR programs. The United Nations adopts a lead role in most single-country DDR programs in Africa, but various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and aid groups, are also typically involved. In Liberia, for example, UNICEF leads child DDR (for combatants aged seventeen and younger), and no less than six other groups—including the World Food Program, World Health Organization (WHO), ActionAid, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)—administer adult DDR. The largest DDR program on the continent, a multi-country initiative in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa known as MDRP, is run by the World Bank in conjunction with forty other Western and African governments, NGOs, and regional organizations. Though this program does not include disarmament (World Bank policy prohibits it), it currently supports some 455,000 ex-combatants.

The multitude of agencies involved in DDR can often create confusion and management conflicts.

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Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.