The previous chapters have described different aspects of why reparation and reintegration have failed to transform gender inequality, including essentialized views of gendered harms, persistent victim– perpetrator binaries and the tendency to ‘do something for women’ rather than transform gender relations. Although, in different ways, these elements are all related to aspects of citizenship, in this chapter, I focus more specifically on the practices of citizenship of the women in Chibolo and Pondores and how these are reinforced or weakened by reparation and reintegration. The chapter thus focuses on the second part of my research question: do current reparation and reintegration laws and policies enable communities to ‘salir adelante’, or move forward? Citizenship might seem a very abstract concept, based on a combination of formal rights and obligations, but it also entails a practice, which can be more or less active, in which individuals demand their citizenship rights as part of a shared political community in which they participate as equals, based on a sense of political autonomy (Mouffe 1992; Taylor 2004; Kabeer 2012). Since citizenship essentially is about people's relationship with the state – and each other – it is in fact very relevant to local, everyday experiences of peacebuilding and integration of both survivors and ex-combatants in society. Based on the previous chapters, it is perhaps not surprising that people both in Pondores and Chibolo describe, either explicitly or implicitly, their sense of not being treated as full citizens by the state, as I explain in this chapter. I also describe how their citizenship practice changed from active or even radical to passive. I then look at how reparation and reintegration processes reproduced clientelist and ‘assistentialist’ tendencies which make people passive recipients rather than active citizens, thus diminishing the transformative potential of these processes and instead making people dependent on an ineffective state.

Experiences of citizenship

In Chibolo, the feeling of not being treated as full citizens by the state was the result of the state's failure to deliver upon promises about reparations, restitution and the corresponding improvements in basic social and infrastructural services.