Conclusion
The participants' narratives contribute, in numerous ways, to our understanding of the opportunities and challenges that characterize the urban post-conflict terrain. For one, postwar landscapes can potentially offer fresh new social and economic spaces within which innovative and instrumental endeavors can be constructed.
The motorbike taxi industry in Sierra Leone is a case in point. While offering viable opportunities for employment to the country's urban youth population, this economic venture has simultaneously filled a gap in the nation's urban transportation industry. In so doing, the industry can be considered to be of great importance to the country's urban economic and social reconstruction and development.Secondly, former child soldiers have demonstrated their unique capacity to carve out their own paths for reintegration without the support of DDR and government. By drawing on the skills, resources, social networks, and knowledge developed during the war, former child soldiers have innovatively built enterprises and supportive communities that meet their economic and social needs. This reality challenges the notion that all ex-soldiers are in need of sophisticated, paternalistic reintegration programs, which are, for the most part, created and imposed by external agents. Often such programs do not recognize the agency and industriousness of former child soldiers, nor do they seriously consider the state and needs of the labor and broader economic market.
The findings stress the need to more meaningfully consider alternatives to postwar reintegration, specifically endeavors that are relatively more “grassroots” in nature and that directly implicate marginalized youth, including former child soldiers. While international and governmental programs such as DDR may be beneficial, based on the current study, they may fall short of meeting ex-soldiers' and post-conflict societies' social, political, and economic needs.