scholarly journals Rejection and Resilience: Returning from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda

Civil Wars ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Tim Allen ◽  
Jackline Atingo ◽  
Melissa Parker
Keyword(s):  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

scholarly journals The Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong N. Pham ◽  
Patrick Vinck ◽  
Eric Stover
Keyword(s):  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

scholarly journals Being Normal: Stigmatization of Lord’s Resistance Army Returnees as ‘Moral Experience’ in Post-war Northern Uganda

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Macdonald ◽  
Raphael Kerali
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Moral Experience ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Multiple Functions ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Post War ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

Abstract The literature on Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) returnees in Acholiland, northern Uganda tells us that those who returned from the rebel group are likely to experience stigma and social exclusion. While the term is deployed frequently, ‘stigma’ is not a well-developed concept and most of the evidence we have comes from accounts of returnees themselves. Focusing instead on the ‘stigmatizers’, this article theorizes stigmatization as part of the ‘moral experience’ of regulating post-war social repair. Through interview-based and ethnographic methods, it finds that stigmatization of LRA returnees takes many forms and serves multiple functions, calling into question whether this catch-all term actually obscures more than it illuminates. While stigmatization is usually practised as a form of ‘social control’, its function can be ‘reintegrative’ rather than purely exclusionary. Through the northern Uganda case study, this article seeks to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of the manifestations and functions of stigmatization in spaces of return, challenging the logic underpinning those interventions that seek to reduce it.

Against Humanity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Dubal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
The Common ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

This book is not about crimes against humanity. Rather, it is an indictment of “humanity,” the concept that lies at the heart of human rights and humanitarian missions. Based on fieldwork in northern Uganda, this book brings readers inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, an insurgent group accused of rape, forced conscription of children, and inhumane acts of violence. The author talks with and learns from former rebels as they find meaning in wartime violence, politics, spirituality, and love—experiences that observers often place outside the boundaries of humanity. Rather than approaching the LRA as a set of possibilities, humanity looks at the LRA as a set of problems, as inhuman enemies needing reform. Humanity hegemonizes what counts as good in ways that are difficult to question or challenge. It relies on specific notions of the good—shaped in ideals of modern violence, technology, modernity, and reason, among others—in ways that do violence to the common good. What emerges from this ethnography is an unorthodox question—what would it mean to be “against humanity”? Against Humanity provocatively asks us how to honor life existing outside normative moralities. It challenges us to shift toward alternative, more radical approaches to humanitarian, political, medical, and other interventions, rooted in anti-humanism.

scholarly journals What Happened to Children Who Returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Allen ◽  
Jackline Atingo ◽  
Dorothy Atim ◽  
James Ocitti ◽  
Charlotte Brown ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Best Practice Guidelines ◽  
Displaced Children ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army ◽  
Reception Centre

Abstract In northern Uganda, more than 50,000 people were recruited by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) between the late 1980s and 2004, mostly by force. Around half of those taken were children (under 18 years old). A large number were never seen by their families again, but more than 20,000 returned through aid-financed reception centres. Endeavours were made to reunite them with their relatives, who were mostly living in insecure displacement camps. Relatively few were subsequently visited, even after the fighting ended in 2006. Thousands of vulnerable children were largely left to their own devices. This article draws on research carried out in 2004–06 and from 2012 to 2018, and compares findings with other publications on reintegration in the region. It argues that implementing best-practice guidelines for relocating displaced children with their immediate relatives had negative consequences. The majority of children who passed through a reception centre are now settled as young adults on ancestral land, where they are commonly abused because of their LRA past. With few exceptions, it is only those who spent a long period with the LRA and who are not living on ancestral land who have managed to avoid such experiences.

scholarly journals The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Henni Alava
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Extreme Violence ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Catholic Church

This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at times discordant and contradictory sounds, and cannot be consigned to single-cause explanations such as ‘trauma’ or ‘recovery’. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between these modes of amplification calls for reflection on the temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.

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