As I described in the Introduction, victimhood is a central term and category in transitional justice (TJ), and it is a crucial one when researching the gendered dynamics of current reparation and reintegration laws and policies on the ground and their effectiveness in enabling communities to move forward by transforming structural gender inequality. Victimhood is essential for understanding the potential, or rather the obstacles, for gendered transformation, because it suggests passivity, vulnerability and a lack of agency, and it may result in ignoring the resistance and agency that people displayed (Kapur 2002; De Waardt 2016). In this way, it is unhelpful for retrieving the instances of agency described in the previous chapter, which could help to promote processes of citizenship building. In this chapter, I describe the problematic victim– perpetrator binary inherent in TJ and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) in and beyond Colombia, and why it is an obstacle for salir adelante. I also describe how the categories of victims and perpetrators produce moral questions and sometimes discomfort for researchers working with both groups. I suggest the overarching category and identity of citizenship to overcome these rigid binaries which ultimately maintain divisions, inequality and polarization in society.

Victim– perpetrator hierarchies in transitional justice

One of the defining elements of a ‘true victim’ is innocence, implying that victims cannot have been actively involved in conflict (Bouris 2007; Madlingozi 2007). Innocence and moral purity make victims deserving of justice and reparations. Those seen as somehow responsible for their own victimization, or worse even, as perpetrators of violence, tend to be excluded from the support reserved for innocent victims. This creates a binary between the good, innocent victim and the bad perpetrator (Moffett 2016), ignoring a ‘grey zone’ of people whose experiences are not so easily classified (Levi 2013). This grey zone includes those who joined armed groups after having experienced injustice, who suffered harms after joining armed groups and people who were forced to commit crimes as part of self-defence groups or as child soldiers (Viaene 2011; Theidon 2013). These individuals could be seen as victims and perpetrators at the same time, and it is often difficult to establish which of those roles, victim or perpetrator, is dominant in individual experiences (Borer 2003; Orozco 2003).