The role of young people in times of conflict and their potential within postconflict recovery are phenomenal. If efforts are not made to reintegrate the youth and access their potential in Southern Sudan, post-conflict recovery will have limited success. Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes are the primary instruments that external actors can apply to induce spoilers of peace into the peace process or to reduce their threat to microlevel dynamism and to promote creative life strategies of war-affected individuals who are primary stake-holders in the nation-building process. By providing for the educational, vocational and other social needs of young ex-combatants and enabling them to gain skills and competences that facilitate their economic and social integration, the youths may be brought to a point where they find the alternative of returning to combat unattractive. In meeting the needs of the youths, it is important not to homogenise them as either security threats or passive victims needing special sympathy, but as complex and heterogeneous 30Shastry Njeru 30 individuals with multiple skills, aspirations and limitations of their own.Effective DDR programming must factor in the wartime history of individuals.Dealing with the past strategies in southern Sudan should acknowledge and build on the youths' potential as the starting point.

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This chapter reviews the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum's (the Forum 1) 'Taking Transitional Justice to the People Programme'. The Forum is a coalition of 22 human rights organizations in Zimbabwe providing legal and psychosocial support to victims of organized violence and torture. It has existed since 1998. In 2009 the Forum began the Taking Transitional Justice to the People Programme to motivate participation of the general population in addressing human rights violations and bringing closure to the egregious past in Zimbabwe. It was an outreach programme-the first of its kind in Zimbabwe-seeking to create a movement for transitional justice. The Forum asserts that 'the programme aimed at taking [the] transitional justice agenda to the victims of past violations and establish[ing] the people's understanding of and commitment to the [process]' (Forum, 2010: 13) through discussions among Zimbabweans on the transitional justice options available and their preferences (ibid.: 13). In this chapter, we demonstrate how transitional justice knowledge production can be commoditized and contested. It has been argued that many knowledge producers from the Global South, given the choice, would prefer not to use knowledge 'raw materials' from the Global North in their knowledge industries but rather prefer to promote their own knowledge production