Civil wars destroy infrastructure, livelihoods, and crucially, social relations. How can men and women who were part of armed groups reintegrate, i.e. establish trust and cooperation with civilians, after war?
This is an urgent question: 2025 was the most violent year recorded since 1946, with 65 active state-based conflicts across 35 countries and more than 255,000 conflict-related fatalities, driven above all by the war in Ukraine, the bombardment of Gaza, and mass violence in Sudan (Rustad, 2026). Many of these conflicts are recurrences of earlier ones, pointing to a persistent weakness in how former combatants are reintegrated into civilian life after demobilization. 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. 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, cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, gender studies, and social psychology. Second, it employs an innovative combination of life history interviews, a survey experiment, 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.
Com2Civ will reveal the social-psychological mechanisms involved in combatant-to-civilian transformation processes, contributing to scientific efforts aimed at understanding how intergroup relations develop after war. Com2Civ results will appear in major multidisciplinary journals, advancing the field in at least four disciplines.
