Beyond Bullets or Ballots: Ex-Combatants and Radical Nonviolent Resistance

This paper explores a path out of armed conflict that is often overlooked: when former rebels remain collectively organized and shift from armed struggle to radical nonviolent resistance. Most research and policy approaches treat ex-combatants either as security risks to be managed or as political actors who must demobilize into private life or formal party politics. Yet most former fighters of non-state armed groups who disarm do not return to violence, and many continue to resist entrenched inequalities and injustice through nonviolent collective action that falls outside existing institutions. Drawing on fieldwork in Colombia conducted between 2019 and 2024, the paper examines how some former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) transitioned from armed insurgency to collective, nonviolent resistance rooted in cooperative and communal projects. Rather than abandoning political struggle, these former fighters reworked it. They remained organized, pursued ambitious social and economic goals, and engaged in everyday acts of resistance to marginalization and political exclusion, while deliberately keeping their distance from party politics and the state. To explain ex-combatant radical nonviolence and its broader impacts, this paper makes three core claims. First, reintegration policies that support collective, locally rooted organizing shape whether former rebels can sustain nonviolent resistance after war. Second, security conditions and relationships with surrounding communities determine whether ex-combatant collective resistance can be practiced openly and non-violently rather than subversively. Third, collective former-rebel resistance can produce meaningful peace dividends, including improved livelihoods, stronger local reconciliation, and more transformative peacebuilding. Taken together, these findings challenge narrow assumptions about postwar reintegration and show how former rebels can continue to resist injustice—and contribute to peace—without rearming or being absorbed into existing political institutions.