Life after War

Explores the lives of ten people in the aftermath of the Ivorian civil war in order to argue for more bespoke peacebuilding programmes the world over.

What happens when a war ends, the final shots are fired, and the donors and media crews go home?

Delving into the lives of ten Ivoirian citizens in the aftermath of the Ivoirian Civil War, this book sheds new light on how post-conflict peacebuilding impacts differently on different people’s day-to-day lives. Ex-combatants tell how they long for the glory days of the conflict and how they have struggled to reintegrate into a post-conflict society which they feel does not want them. Victims explain the impossibility of dealing with the trauma of loss in a country where forgetting becomes the norm. Soldiers who found new lives in the military at the end of the war celebrate their newfound riches and luxurious lifestyles. Government ministers seek to deny the conflict ever happened or try to present tendentious versions of it.

Taken together, these stories highlight the need for peacebuilding programmes to ditch one-size-fits-all approaches in order to grapple with the specific social dynamics of individual post-conflict countries. This is essential reading for researchers and students of international development and African studies, as well as for international practitioners the world over.