Negotiating faith in exile: learning from displacements from and into Arua, North West Uganda

Humanitarians have recently championed faith actors as valuable resources in delivering humanitarian aid. Partnerships are increasingly promoted through international declarations and bespoke toolkits. Such approaches are abstracted from the historical and contemporary contexts through which faith is negotiated, and through which faith actors have become legitimate. This paper explores how faith has been entangled within the dynamics of two spatially connected crises: Ugandans fleeing post-Amin reprisals in the mid-1980s, and South Sudanese fleeing civil war from 2013. Drawing attention to the local-structural engagements which have shaped forms of protection and the legitimacy of faith actors, this paper urges for a consideration of complexity in humanitarians’ localisation calculations.