Who is watching? Refugee protection during a pandemic-responses from Uganda and South Africa

Reflecting on the first 6 months of the pandemic responses in terms of refugee protection, Uganda and South Africa have taken diverging pathways. South Africa used the pandemic to start building a border fence on the border with Zimbabwe, initially curtailed all foreign shop owners from opening under lockdown and excluded asylum seekers from emergency relief grants. In contrast, Uganda opened its borders to refugees from the DRC in June, when border closures were still the global norm.
This article examines how Uganda and South Africa govern refugees and migration. The authors examine how the pandemic affects arguably some of the most vulnerable populations, namely refugees and other migrants? And how does the pandemic response link back to pre-existing political interests when it comes to protecting refugees?

Is we they? A cross-cultural study of responses to COVID-19 updates in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda

This article delineates the material relations, routines and sensorial responses inhabited by people in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. It grounds views on a discourse of behavioural change while exploring how Ugandans, Kenyans and Rwandans responded to COVID-19 messages populated on selected official government Twitter accounts. The article is a mixed methods study that employs a numeric and discursive analytic approach, with the nudge theory proving particularly congenial.

Experiences of persons in COVID-19 institutional quarantine in Uganda: a qualitative study

Quarantine has been adopted as a key public health measure to support the control of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in many countries Uganda adopted institutional quarantine for individuals suspected of exposure to severe COVID-19 to be placed in institutions like hotels and/or hostels of institutions for at least 14 days. During the lockdown instituted in Uganda, repatriation flights for citizens and residents stranded abroad were gradually allowed in the country from June 2020 until when the airport was officially opened on 1st October 2020. Returning residents were required to undergo mandatory institutional quarantine at their own cost, if they could not obtain the limited space in free government quarantine centres.
This study explored experiences of individuals who underwent institutional quarantine in Uganda to inform measures to increase its effectiveness and reduce its associated negative impact.

Deadly secret: situating the unknowing and knowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda

This article critically examines the unknowing of the source of the Ebola epidemic in Northern Uganda, in 2000/1, by asking how this unknowing has been achieved and has shaped the disease situation. This article follows the author’s informants’ explanation that soldiers of the Uganda People’s Defence Force had brought the disease from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda. This account is widely rejected as a rumour by scientists, who insist that the source of the epidemic remains unknown. By contrast, the author suggests that following these stories, as embodied experiences of the multiple connections between war and epidemics, human and nonhuman lives, provides crucial insights into the political ecology of Ebola in the wider region – a region where, even today, conflict and Ebola outbreaks are intricately interwoven.

Legacies of humanitarian neglect: long term experiences of children who returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda

Much has been written about the short-term challenges facing children returning ‘home’ from rebel fighting groups, but little is known about the longer term day to day realities of return. Support for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants following protracted war and conflict occurs in the expectation that it will promote peace, national reconciliation and economic development. Much of the research focuses on the social, psychological and economic challenges facing former recruits at the time of return, or soon afterwards. Only a few studies have attempted to document longer-term experiences.
This article presents findings from the first long-term assessment of the social and economic challenges facing an officially registered group of children who passed through an internationally-financed reception centre after a period of time with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Fieldwork through the Zoomiverse: Sensing Uganda in a Time of Immobility

With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, research collaborations that involved multiple sites or institutions were challenged by travel restrictions and the switch to online communication. This article is a reflection by two longtime collaborators, Richard Vokes and Gertrude Atukunda. They reflect on their collaborative work, the rapid redesign of methodologies, and how ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ can be re-designed.

Hidden Tales of Ebola: Airing the Forgotten Voices of Ugandan “Ebola Nurses”

Uganda experienced three Ebola outbreaks between 2000 and 2012, the largest and most destructive occurred in the Gulu region in 2000. This outbreak occurred during the rainy season when malaria rates were highest, thus complicating the diagnosis. As the outbreak accelerated, health care workers were not alerted that the infectious agent was Ebola nor were they informed about the disease and the mode of transmission. Nurses, during this period, were working without personal protective equipment (PPE) and guidelines to implement precautions. As a result, 64% of health care workers became infected.
This research sought to answer the research question: “What was it like being a nurse living through and surviving Ebola?” It therefore describes the experiences of Ugandan nurse survivors who cared for Ebola patients in Gulu, a city in the northern region of Uganda.

Lives Interrupted: Navigating Hardship During COVID-19 Provides Lessons in Solidarity and Visibility for Mobile Young People in South Africa and Uganda

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended assumptions about livelihood security. The authors examine data from young women and men in South Africa and young female sex workers in Uganda to explore the inequalities and hardships experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and investigate the opportunities and ability presented to navigate in a virtual world to build an inclusive supportive future for young people on the move. They argue that against the backdrop of a fragile past, young people who see their today disturbed, tomorrow reshaped and their futures interrupted, need support to interact with their social environment and adjust their lives and expectations amidst the changing influences of social forces.

Chiefs’ Courts, Hunger, and Improving Humanitarian Programming in South Sudan

South Sudan has seen the most frequent reporting of localised famine conditions globally between 2013-2020, on average at least one pocket of famine conditions every two months. Focusing on identified famines, however, masks a broader and even more frequent issue of extreme food insecurity at or near the severity of famine during the same period. As pockets of famine conditions are rarely predicted by humanitarian early warning systems, this report examined how chiefs’ courts in South Sudan recognised and managed hunger.
Drawing on household survey data and court observations in Warrap state in 2018, the authors demonstrate how courts redistribute food during periods of scarcity. They use an especially fine-grained and sensitive form of targeting for food assistance. Humanitarian engagement with chief’s courts is encouraged – as long as it is contextually informed and locally nuanced.

“This is your disease”: Dynamics of local authority and NGO responses to Covid-19 in South Sudan

Drawing on interviews and observations conducted in South Sudan in 2020-21, this report explores how South Sudanese NGOs and local government actors responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors argue that unfilled local government positions undermined the Covid response in some areas, yet different public authorities stepped in to create a degree of continuity and ‘governance without government’.
The report also highlights how the pandemic response impacted NGOs’ existing projects and priorities. Funding was often suspended or cut, and trust in aid workers threatened because of fears they might on the one hand pose an infection risk, and on the other that they were prioritising Covid-19 over more pressing local concerns.

The ‘Nuer of Dinka money’ and the demands of the dead: contesting the moral limits of monetised politics in South Sudan

This article explores the meaning of monetary exchanges in politics and political identities during South Sudan’s armed conflicts since 2013, in order to understand whether shifts in the moral meaning of money in politics confer legitimacy to current governmental configurations of power and peace. The authors argue that trading loyalty for monetary reward can assert an acceptance of power, social norms and connected identities, but can also lead to contested moral boundaries that play an important role in remaking political identities and communities.

Competing authorities and norms of restraint: governing community-embedded armed groups in South Sudan

How can international humanitarian actors help to restrain the conduct of armed groups when they violate moral, legal and humanitarian norms? Using qualitative and ethnographic research in South Sudan, this article explores patterns of restraint among the gojam and titweng cattle-guarding defense forces from 2014 to 2017. Rather than acting under an absence of authority, certain public authorities, including those external to the armed groups, gained sufficient legitimacy within these groups to intervene in debates about restraint during conflict.
Armed groups and their members could still reinterprete norms to allow restraint, as acts of ‘creative refusal’ against their militarised leaders. This implies that while there is an opportunity for the international community to participate in debates about restraint during conflict, they will only be taken seriously if they invest in understanding the underlying logics which govern such restraint.

“He Cannot Marry Her”: Excluding The Living And Including The Dead In South Sudanese Citizenship In Sudan

Using qualitative interviews and observations of Nuer chiefs’ courts to examine reforms to marriage laws within a South Sudanese refugee camp in Sudan, this article argues that chiefs’ courts contested humanitarian assumptions about citizenship by re-emphasising kinship as the primary basis for political communities. In doing so, the notion of citizenship shifted to become trans-territory and no bounded by any one nation state.

The longue durée of short-lived infrastructure – Roads and state authority in South Sudan

Road-building, followed by road runi and rebuilding, have been a cyclical feature of development in South Sudan. This article focuses on two internationally funded roads built around independence to explore their meaning for central government, and for people living along the roads. Road-building initially acted as a display of the promissory capacity of the new government and a means to reorient power towards Juba.
However, the roads’ deterioration (and therefore perpetual re-emergence of new road projects) allowed coercive forms of management to become entrenched, and still acted as a reminder of the initial power of the government to undertake large-scale infrastructural projects.

‘I Kept My Gun’: Displacement’s Impact on Reshaping Social Distinction During Return

Drawing on the experiences of men born in Southern Sudan in the 1980s, grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya and later returned to Southern Sudan after the 2005 peace agreement, this article explores the social implications of experiences during displacement when people subsequently return. Periods of displacement and return are characterised by both social rupture and continuity, for example engaging in strategies to maintain certain customs. Access to symbolic or economic capital while displaced differ markedly from those offered by social relations prior to displacement.
The authors argue that returning home can be far from an easy process. Assumptions that forced displacement ensures complete social rupture, or that ‘home’ remains unchanged, may blind humanitarian actors to social shifts and power struggles that will shape how their policies are experienced and implemented.

How can ethnomusicology support humanitarian protection research?

This article argues that ethnomusicology offers an important approach to understanding issues of participatory humanitarian safety and protection. Using music and dance as a means to better understand people’s ways of life can give insight into the larger cultural contexts that shape people’ lives. Performance activities may be discursive sites where social structures and cultural meanings are (re)negotiated. Specifically in the humanitarian context, music is a form of communication that can enable the sharing of experiences that are not otherwise easy to convey, and can give voice to the voiceless.

Bottom-up humanitarian protection: the experience of a young South Sudanese car-cleaner in Khartoum

What kinds of humanitarian protection are available for displaced people living outside of refugee camps? This article explores the forms of safety and protection available to displaced south Sudanese people living in Sudan, including community-based mechanisms such as family and friends, individual relationships with health workers and policement, informal legal support from South Sudanese community leaders living nearby, or spiritual protection through religious practices.

Land disputes in South Sudan continue to affect refugees and IDPs

Post-conflict land disputes can seriously disrupt efforts by displaced people to return home. This article examines the different public authorities at play in securing or challenging someone’s right to use or own land in South Sudan. Such cases are often complicated by changes in local positions of power, such as new chiefs, who would typically be responsible for adjudicating on land allocation.
The author argues that government intervention is necessary to institute formal legal processes for local public authorities to resolve land disputes and avoid conflict between displaced people and new residents who have informally occupied land (‘thaken achuai’).

Why a South Sudanese NGO had to choose between protecting staff and strangers

This article highlights the risks of working for national rather than international organisations in humanitarian contexts. After the authors’ NGO base was attacked in April 2022, he had to navigate the complex balance between staying safe and saving strangers – the reason the organisation Nile Hope was established. This balance is different for those working for international or national organisations. The latter are often more reliant on communities and local relations to stay safe, rather than outside help.
Taking malnutrition supplies as they fled may have helped the author and his colleagues survive as they fled and spend several days hiding, but may also have led to accusations of stealing food meant for the local community.

‘The data is gold, and we are the gold-diggers’: whiteness, race and contemporary academic research in eastern DRC ‘Les données, c’est de l’or, et nous sommes les chercheurs d’or’: la blanchité, la race et la recherche universitaire contemporaine dans l’est de la RDC

The humanitarian and development industry in eastern DRC and the demand for qualitative and quantitative research accompanying it have created a novel political economy of academic research. An array of research associations and private data collection firms have emerged to respond to this demand from Western universities and research projects. The racial dimension of academic research is rarely reflected upon, partly because it is often invisible to white Western researchers.
This paper reflects on the creation and evolution of a non-profit association specialized in data collection in conflict-affected areas of eastern DRC. The association was conceived by Congolese and European founders as an enclave against the racism that pervades professional relations in the region, an experiment upheld by a collective commitment to academic research and egalitarianism. Written from the perspective of three of its founding members, this paper analyses how racialized discursive repertoires and cognitive biases (re)appeared within the organization.

Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo

This contribution analyses the role of taxation in the constitution of authority in the conflict-ridden eastern DRC, where numerous authorities alternately compete and collude over the right to extract resources. Taxation ranges from simple plunder, to protection rackets, to material reciprocation of the recognition of rights.
Focusing on taxation practices of armed groups, the article argues taxation is core to armed groups’ production of public authority and citizenship, and that their modes of taxation are based on long-standing registers of authority and practices of rule originating in the colonial era.
In particular, the article shows that by appealing to both local customary and national forms of political community and citizenship, armed groups can assume public authority to tax civilians. However, their public authority may be undermined by tendencies to reproduce historical patterns in which authorities forcefully impose a heavy tax burden,

Contesting Authority: Armed rebellion and military fragmentation in Walikale and Kalehe, North and South Kivu

Eastern DRC continues to be plagued by violence and dozens of armed groups. Yet, these groups—and how they interact with their social and political environment—remain poorly understood. This report analyses their involvement in public life in the territories of Kalehe and Walikale, the outcome of the intersection of several local historical processes with larger national and regional dynamics. The current political and military landscape in these territories, defined by the presence of armed groups and the consequent fragmentation of local authority, is mainly caused by unresolved tensions between and within communities over territory, authority and resources; the lack of capacity of state services to provide protection; and the limited success of reintegration efforts.
The report explores how these armed groups are embedded in local communities, connected to local power struggles and involved in the exercise of local authority, including in security,

South Kivu: identity, territory, and power in the eastern Congo. Usalama Project Report: Understanding Congolese Armed Groups

This report outlines the historical dynamics behind the armed movements in South Kivu, focusing on the period before and leading up to the First Congo War. It concentrates on sources of local conflict but argues that these can only be understood when also concentrating on wider political, social, economic, and demographic processes at both national and regional levels.
While armed rebellion in South Kivu has shifted over time, and while each militia has its own history, this report traces the broader context of South Kivu’s militarization.

Ethnogovernmentality: The Making of Ethnic Territories and Subjects in Eastern Congo

In this article I investigate colonial constructions of ethnicity and territory and their effects in the post-independence period in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The core argument of the article is that the constructions of ethnicity and territory that are set in motion in struggles over political space in the Congolese conflicts are conditioned by what I call “ethnogovernmentality”, which denotes a heterogeneous ensemble of biopolitical and territorial rationalities and practices of power concerned with the conduct of conduct of ethnic populations.
Through ethnogovernmentality colonial authorities sought to impose ordered scientific visions of ethnicity, custom, culture, space, territory, and geography, upon ambivalent cultures and spaces. I show that while ethnogovernmentality failed to produce the stability and order the colonial authorities sought, its ethno-territorial regime of truth and practice has had durable effects on people’s sense of self and on struggles over political space.

Navigating Social Spaces: Armed Mobilization and Circular Return in Eastern DR Congo

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 DRC, where Congolese youth have revolved in and out of armed groups for several decades. While the notion of circular return originates 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.

The Politics of Rebellion and Intervention in Ituri: The Emergence of a New Political Complex?

This paper aims to place the Ituri conflict into its social setting, arguing the outbreak of violence resulted from the exploitation, by local and regional actors, of a deeply rooted local political conflict for access to land, economic opportunity and political power. Secondly, it is asserted that, although foreign elements (i.e. the UPDF and RDF, formerly RPA) contributed significantly to the escalation of the political crisis in Ituri, the war also provided a perfect platform for local political and economic actors to redefine their positions in this new political and economic landscape.
Eventually, this emerging political complex has led to the development of a new political economy characterized by a shift from traditional to military rule, to privatized, non-territorial networks of economic control, and to the consolidation of ethnic bonds in the economic and political sphere.

Doing business out of war. An analysis of the UPDF’s presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

This paper analyses how Ugandan army commanders have mobilised transborder economic networks to exploit economic opportunities in eastern DRC during the military intervention of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) in Congo’s wars (1996–97; 1998–2003). These networks are the starting point of our evaluation of the informal political structures and networks linking Uganda’s political centre to Congo’s war complex.
While often claimed that military entrepreneurismalism in the DRC has undermined political stability in Uganda, we argue the activities of Ugandan military entrepreneurs/networks under their control were integral to Uganda’s governance regime. Crucial to development of this entrepreneurialism was the existence of pre-war transborder networks of economic exchange connecting Congo to eastern African markets. Military control over these highly informalised networks facilitated UPDF commanders’ access to Congo’s resources. Rather than operating as privatised sources of accumulation, these military shadow networks were directly linked to the Ugandan regime’s inner circles.

Rebels without borders in the Rwenzori borderland? A biography of the Allied Democratic Forces

This article provides a detailed analysis of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel movement that is operating from Congolese soil but so far has attracted very limited scholarly attention. Having its roots in Ugandan Islamic community, it has become part of larger transborder dynamics of rebellion and resistance. It is argued that although its institution is linked to several internal dynamics in Uganda, the movement’s character has been largely shaped by the specific characteristics of the Uganda–DRC Rwenzori borderland, where it became a key player of local power struggles and conflicts.
The article provides a detailed account of the origins, characteristics and strategies of the ADF, its integration into Congolese society and its impact on local and regional dynamics of conflict.

Negotiated peace for extortion: the case of Walikale territory in eastern DR Congo

War in the DRC has increasingly been explained as a means to get access to natural resources and as a strategy to get control over informal trading networks linked to global markets. In most of these accounts, the complexity of war economies is underestimated. One element often missing is that systems of economic exploitation, which have been developed by armed groups during the Congolese war, tend to persist in the post-conflict context and seem to be hardly affected by the peace process.
Based on an evaluation of the case of the Congolese National Army’s (FARDC) non-integrated 85th Brigade, a former Mayi-Mayi militia now operating under the banner of the FARDC and deeply involved in the exploitation of cassiterite in Walikale (North Kivu), this paper illustrates how mechanisms of exploitation that have been instituted during the war can largely survive in peacetime conditions.

Producing democracy in armed violence settings: Elections and citizenship in Eastern DRC

The article analyses how the 2018 elections in the DRC contributed to a further opening of the democratic space and shared expressions and sentiments of citizenship. Through an ethnography of the electoral process in the South Kivu province, we investigate how claiming rights that come with citizenship and how people’s political identity, shape and are being shaped by electoral processes.

Uganda National Technical Guidelines for IDSR, Third Edition

Uganda Ministry of Health National Technical Guidelines for Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response, Third Edition (September 2021). These official guidelines set out the Government of Uganda’s policies and strategy concerning public health surveillance, early warning and response.

Uganda Covid-19 Preparedness and Response Plan, March 2020

This sets out the Government of Uganda’s overarching strategy and early response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including stengthening leadership and coordination, strengthening diagnostic capacity, raising public awareness, developing capacity for case management and psychosocial support, and strengthening social protection mechanisms.

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