This study focuses on soldiers returning from peacekeeping missions and the challenges they experience adapting to the home environment in the postdeployment phase. The article focuses on South African peacekeepers returning from missions in Darfur/Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. Interviews with 50 South African peacekeepers on the challenges they face in terms of their homecoming, family reintegration, and military support were conducted. Overall, the study found that both external military factors such as deployment length and nature of mission, and internal factors specific to the soldier affected reintegration. We highlight three major findings of our study: Firstly, our analysis show that peacekeepers across gender, rank, and race identify the absence from their children as a major challenge. Secondly, while relational turbulence characterized by ambivalence and concerns about infidelity was prevalent among all, there was a clear difference in the answers between the male and female peacekeepers. Thirdly, a large majority voiced the need for more support from the military institution for their families, before, during, and after deployment.

This article examines the extent to which the participation of women in the military furthers or hinders the displacement of gendered dichotomies and whether this brings about more transformative change to military institutions. Based on research of the South African National Defence Force, the authors argue that although typical 'feminine' qualities at times are valued in peace operations, this has not contributed to a transformation of gender relations in the military. The authors identify the lack of change as due to a deep-seated patriarchal culture in South Africa and essentialist discourses that affect women's identities as soldiers. Three discourses are identified in the interviews which accentuate this phenomenon: civilianizing, sexualizing and victimizing discourses. While these discourses are not necessarily negative to female soldiers' inclusion in the military, the focus on differences related to gender stereotypes renders a displacement of gendered hierarchies and consequently also a regendered military difficult.

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In this article we develop and expand the rebel-to-ruler literature to go beyond 'rebel transformations', in order to examine the transformation and militarisation of the entire post-genocide society in Rwanda. Through a historical and socio-political analysis of the military's influence in post-genocide Rwanda we argue that the adoption of military norms and ethos, drawn from an idealised and reconstructed precolonial history, rather than simply an insurgent past, motivates the military's centrality and penetration of all society's sectors, economically, politically and socially with the ultimate aim of retaining power in the hands of the rebels turned rulers. As such, the case demonstrates the need for an expansion of the rebel-to-ruler literature i) beyond its concern with parties and regime type to a broader palette of governance effects and ii) beyond its singular focus on insurgent past and towards a longue-durée understanding of complementary causes.