Nothing focuses the mind like waking amidst 400 rioting ex-combatants.

It was April, and my wife and I were visiting an ex-com reintegration program in rural Liberia. We’d stayed overnight in the agricultural school’s guest house, after an evening out with the trainers and counselors. The counselors were all ex-coms themselves, and oversaw the six month training program for former fighters in Liberia’s civil war.

The students, meanwhile, were so-called ‘hard cases’ from one of the country’s notorious hotspots: Guthrie rubber plantation. Several hundred fighters settled there after the war, illegally tapping rubber and, occasionally, causing trouble for the more legitimate residents. The agricultural training program was designed to pull them out, give them meaningful skills, and help the youth resettle in their home communities.

The morning of the outburst, soap and rubber boots had failed to arrive for the third or fourth day in a row. The students decided to strike, and the confrontations with the teachers and counselors began to turn angry. For these young men, raised in a rebel group, violence was the natural recourse in any disagreement.

Then an amazing thing happened. A lone counselor, standing in the vortex of a angry student whirlpool, wagged his finger in the leader’s faces. “This is not what we have learned to do,” he said. “If you have a problem, you know what you do: you elect your spokespeople and we talk about this quietly, while the rest of you go to class.” Fifteen minutes later, that’s exactly what happened. Within an hour, the entire matter was settled.

A few months previous, this outcome would have been inconceivable. In the first weeks, the counselors were up six times a night stopping bloody fights. Physical violence and injury was routine. “When was the last time that happened?” I asked a few months into the program. “Huh,” said one counselor, “I can’t really remember.”

The formal curriculum includes literacy and rice cultivation. But the real education for these young men (and a few women) has been off the books. They’re learning to live in normal society. In particular, they’re being socialized to settle conflict through institutions rather than violence. If things go well, we’re going to figure out how.

A dozen more hotspots like Guthrie dot the Liberian landscape. There are thousands more un-integrated fighters like the youth we met. So far, though, there’s money for maybe another 500 or 1000 youth to pass through this exclusive NGO program. Who’s going to get into the training program next? It looks like we might just settle that question with a lottery. If so, we might have the first randomized evaluation of a program for former fighters.

Brings a whole new meaning to “give peace a chance”.

Is this a brilliant opportunity or the final, logical, and insane extreme in the colonization of the development community by the randomistas? Readers of this blog may be familiar with my peculiar schizophrenia: the rando-skeptic who nevertheless dabbles in field trials. The next couple of weeks I’ll be working this through, and so an answer would be premature. But watch this space.