This article discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their pendular state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where Congolese youth have been going in and out of armed groups for several decades now. While the notion of circular return has its origins in migration and refugee studies, we show that it also serves as a useful lens to understand the navigation capacity between different social spaces of combatants and to describe and understand processes of incessant armed mobilization and demobilization. In conceptualizing these processes as forms of circular return, we want to move beyond the remobilization discourse, which is too often connected to an assumed failure of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration processes. We argue that this discourse tends to ignore combatants’ agency and larger processes of socialization and social rupture as part of armed mobilization.

中文翻译：

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驾驭社会空间：刚果民主共和国东部的武装动员和回返

本文讨论了战斗人员的社会流动性，并介绍了循环回返的概念，以解释其在平民和战斗人员之间的摇摆活动状态。这种现象在刚果民主共和国东部（DRC）广泛观察到，几十年来，刚果青年一直进出武装团体。尽管循环回返的概念起源于移民和难民研究，但我们表明，它还可以作为了解战斗人员不同社会空间之间航行能力以及描述和理解不断进行武装动员和复员的过程的有用镜头。在将这些过程概念化为循环回返形式时，我们要超越复员话语，后者通常与假定的裁军失败有关，复员和重返社会过程。我们认为，这种话语倾向于无视战斗人员的代理权以及作为武装动员的一部分的更大程度的社会化和社会破裂。