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This study examines the cost-effectiveness of reintegrating ex-combatants from armed groups in Colombia. After an ethnographic exploration of the challenges of reintegration that ex-combatants face, I evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the reintegration program operated by the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization (Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización, ARN), the government agency that handles the reintegration of ex-combatants from all armed groups in Colombia. I analyze the agency's approaches (past, current, and proposed) toward reintegrating ex-combatants from various armed groups, comparing the financial costs against outcomes. The ARN has been successful at achieving two of its primary goals: minimizing recidivism and maximizing employment of ex-combatants. Only 10% of ARN program participants rejoin criminal groups and 93% find employment across both the formal and informal sectors (informal employment is widespread in Colombia and Latin America). The ARN has been unsuccessful at providing adequate security for ex-combatants. Approximately 6% of ex-combatants enrolled in the ARN program have been murdered since 2001: approximately 3,000 program participants have been assassinated. Next, I evaluate the cost-effectiveness of both the ARN's overall program and its outcome across different regions and demographics of the participant population. Finally, I suggest ways that other countries facing the challenge of reintegrating populations of ex-combatants can learn from the Colombian experience, as well as ways that Colombia can improve its own reintegration cost-effectiveness.

This chapter explores how marginalized youth, specifically former child soldiers in South Sudan, struggle to access education that is crucial in their reintegration process. The chapter draws upon data from a study focusing on the reintegration process of school boys formerly associated with armed forces and groups in South Sudan, and is based on ethnographic fieldwork including interviews and observations of 20 former child soldiers in Malakal, Upper Nile State. The study identifies a number of external factors that inhibit educational opportunities for the boys in their reintegration process. These are their life experiences, the impacts of war, their socioeconomic background and the lack of educational structures due to ongoing conflict. This study describes how the living conditions that motivated the boys to join the armed group are still present after their demobilization. Thus, they not only still find themselves in poverty but the time spent in the armed group and the impacts of war have put them in an even more marginalized position today than prior to their recruitment. The study argues that access to education is crucial in order to prevent recruitment and also re-recruitment to armed groups.

Despite increased academic research interest on how media sources represent and impact social realities, there is little emphasis on homelessness representations in street newspapers. The Greek economic crisis echoed socioeconomic changes and inequalities in both mainstream and lesser-known media with various framing representations of homelessness. One Greek journalistic effort born midcrisis was the street paper ‘Schedia’, which merits examining for its popularity and success as a component of the social reintegration program that launched it. Through the lens of our case study on Schedia and drawing mostly on contemporary interdisciplinary approaches from Cultural Studies and Media Communication, we provide a brief literature review on ‘homelessness street journalism’ research and explore theoretical interpretations thereof. We then discuss media discourse and framing of homelessness and whether it reveals utilisation of street journals mainly as tools for raising awareness or for creating income to maintain or augment social reintegration efforts and programs. We content analysed one year of Schedia's issues and examined instances of both perceived and experienced homelessness representations and causes therein, offering a snapshot of the ways and extent to which Schedia represents homeless voices. Lastly, through the example of Schedia, we discuss whether street media lends itself best as a voice for democratic empowerment of the homeless or as an identity-building intermediary tool for capacitating transformative social reintegration.

The amnesty, reconciliation, and reintegration (AR2) process in a fractured and fragmented society may require assistance from the security sector to become fully operational. This article develops a framework for how such assistance may be implemented, based on current and developing US military operational doctrines and national security documents. It considers briefly the implementation of such principles via a discussion of the AR2 process in Northern Ireland.

Purpose: This chapter analyses the effects of social stratification and inequalities on the outcomes of transnational mobilities, especially on the educational trajectory of returning migrant children.

Study approach: It places the Bourdieusian capital concepts (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984) centre stage, and analyses the convertibility or transferability of the cultural and social capital across different transnational locations. It examines the serious limitations of this process, using the concept of non-dominant cultural capital as a heuristic analytical tool and the education system (school) as a way of approaching the field. As we examine ‘successful mobilities’ of high-status families with children and racialised low-status families experiencing mobility failures, our intention is to draw attention on the effect of the starting position of the migrating families on the outcomes of their cross-border mobilities through a closer reading of insightful cases. We look at the interrelations of social position or class race and mobility experiences through several empirical case studies from different regions of Hungary by examining the narratives of people belonging to very different social strata with a focus on the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ of the socio-economic hierarchy. We examine the transnational mobility trajectories, strategies and the reintegration of school age children from transnationally mobile families upon their return to Hungary.

Findings: Our qualitative research indicates that for returning migrants not only their available capitals in a Bourdieasian sense but also their (de)valuation by the different Hungarian schools has direct consequences on mobility-affected educational trajectories, on the individual outcomes of mobilities, and the circumstances of return and chances for reintegration.

Originality: There is little qualitative research on the effects of emigration from Hungary in recent decades. A more recent edited volume (Váradi, 2018) discusses various intersectionalities of migration such as gender, ethnicity and age. This chapter intends to advance this line of research, analysing the intersectionality of class, ethnicity and race in the context of spatial mobilities through operationalising a critical reading of the Bourdieusian capitals.

Purpose – To demonstrate that countries must implement policies that produce win-win outcomes for countries engaged in highly contentious issues such as return migration. Specifically, while major metropolitan countries have the right to deport “undesirable” nonnationals, their strategies should factor in a concern for the human rights, given that the receiving countries may not have the specialized resources to reintegrate these individuals.

Methodology – Debate on return migration is situated within the context of complex interdependence, and framed within the development–security paradox to demonstrate deductively via an imputed cost–benefit analysis that the security that countries seek through deportation policies may be undermined if creative mechanisms are not incorporated into the policies.

Findings – Because large influxes of returning migrants challenge the capacity of receiving countries to absorb returnees, maintain socioeconomic stability, and engender growth and development, deportation programs should be undertaken against the capacity of receiving countries to seamlessly reintegrate their citizens, many of whom have been culturally, socially, and economically disconnected from the societies in which they were born. Interventions prior to deportation to provide individuals with skills of training, national identification, and orientation to the countries of their birth can produce win-win outcomes for both the sending and receiving countries.

Practical implications – Policy relevance for political leaders and policy makers in both sending and receiving countries.

Value – Original research holding policy relevance for political leaders and policy makers in sending and receiving countries.

Hospital emergency rooms document approximately 500,000 traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in children and adolescents aged 0–14 annually; these prevalence rates do not include those learners evaluated in primary care facilities nor those never evaluated by medical professionals. In this chapter, information on TBI and its effect on learners is provided with emphasis on the idiosyncratic nature of the injury and, thus, the need for individualized reintegration and educational plans. The role of educators in the identification, assessment, reintegration, disability classification, intervention delivery, and progress monitoring is described. Lastly, specific intervention options are presented with cautions that interventions should not be simply picked from a menu, but rather targeting key observations and reported deficits in the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral domains.

This chapter focuses on restorative/rehabilitative faith-based programs, in particular, a youth mentoring program conducted by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice. We begin with a brief description of a faith- and community-based juvenile mentoring program of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (which we are in the process of evaluating) intended to provide community reintegration and restoration of adjudicated delinquents released from state juvenile correctional facilities. Then we move to the overlapping theoretical, philosophical, and empirical backgrounds of restorative justice, faith-based rehabilitative/restorative, and mentoring programs. We conclude with a review of programmatic and empirical issues in faith-based mentoring programs.