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Research paper
Dirty Things: Spiritual Pollution and Life after the Lord’s Resistance Army
Drawing on insights gleaned from ethnographic fieldwork over the last decade, we focus here on targeted research from January to August 2014 with former LRA individuals who were part of a bigger study of clients at an ex-combatant reception centre.…
Research paper
Silencing Distressed Children in the Context of War in Northern Uganda: An Analysis of its Dynamics and its Health Consequences
Children in northern Uganda who are the focus of this article were born and raised in the context of war. The research presented here is based on a one-year ethnographic study (2004–2005) with children aged 9–16 years.
Research paper
Training Theories of Mind in Post-conflict Northern Uganda
In this article, I explore how NGOs train local Acholi counselors to work with psychiatric notions of trauma and practice counseling with local clients.
Background report
CSOs/CBOs and Faith-Based Organizations-Led Peace and Reconciliation Efforts
This policy brief explores the state and role of civil society and community-based organisations and faith-based organisations in peace and reconciliation efforts in South Sudan following the outbreak of violent conflict that began in December 2013. A key reason for…
Background report
Trajectories of International Engagement with State and Local Actors: Evidence from South Sudan
The paper traces shifts in international engagement and the implications of these shifts for understanding the trends in service provision specifically, and recovery and development more generally, in South Sudan. This analysis is intended to offer some direction for the…
Background report
Complexities of Service Delivery and State-Building
The SLRC South Sudan programme has been working since 2012 to identify and understand the realities of livelihoods, access to basic services, and perceptions of governance in post-independence South Sudan. This briefing paper summarises findings from the publications of SLRC…
Background report
Livelihoods and Conflict in South Sudan
The SLRC South Sudan programme has been working since 2012 to identify and understand the realities of livelihoods, access to basic services, and perceptions of governance in post-independence South Sudan. This briefing paper summarises findings from the publications of SLRC…
Background report
Statebuilding and Legitimacy: Experiences of South Sudan
Using South Sudan as a case, this report interrogates people’s perceptions of the state, focusing on sources of legitimacy that are not primarily related to service delivery. It covers the period from the onset of civil war in 1983 to…
Research paper
On Exposure, Vulnerability and Violence: Spatial Distribution of Risk Factors for Climate Change and Violent Conflict across Kenya and Uganda
Recent studies discuss linkages between climate change and violent conflict, especially for East Africa, and focusing on whether climate change increases risk of violent conflict. However, little is known about where a climate-conflict link is most likely to be found.…
Research paper
Beyond scarcity: Rethinking water, climate change and conflict in the Sudans
This article critiques the emphasis on ‘scarcity’, ‘state failure’ and ‘under-development’ within discussions of environmental security, proposing instead an alternative model of environment-conflict relations.
Research paper
Is promoting war trauma such a good idea?
The introduction of trauma narratives has created a market where some are able to thrive, but many deeply troubled individuals remain invisible. The authors found no social benefits from promoting trauma, and few positive effects for individuals. Arguments for urgently…
Reintegration of former child soldiers in northern Uganda: Coming to terms with children’s agency and accountability
Reintegration processes of formerly abducted children have yielded limited success in northern Uganda. The article seeks answers to the question why reintegration processes in the area have failed. The approach of one Christian non-governmental organization towards reintegration is compared with…
Case study
A hard homecoming: lessons learned from the reception center process in northern Uganda: an independent study
This independent report has been commissioned by USAID and UNICEF to examine assumptions and evidence about the needs and experiences of children and adults who have been forced to serve under the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and have subsequently escaped,…
Research paper
Reintegration of Amnestied LRA Ex-Combatants and Survivors’ Resistance Acts in Acholiland, Northern Uganda
This article examines the social dynamics among survivors and amnestied Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) ex-combatants living together in Acholiland, asking how and if Acholi survivors have forgiven Acholi LRA returnees, forgotten past violence and moved on, as stated in northern…
Research paper
What Happened to Children Who Returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda?
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…
Research paper
Justice at the Margins: Witches, Poisoners, and Social Accountability in Northern Uganda
Recent responses to people alleged to be ‘witches’ or ‘poisoners’ among the Madi of northern Uganda are compared with those of the 1980s. From 2006, a democratic system for dealing with suspects was introduced, whereby those receiving the highest number…
Research paper
Rejection and Resilience: Returning from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda
This article focuses on young people who returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, mostly as children, over ten years ago. Supporting normative models of resilience has exacerbated deprivation of the most vulnerable.
Research paper
Reluctant Representatives of the State: Teachers’ Perceptions of Experienced Violence (DR Congo)
My qualitative research in South-Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo suggests that teachers link experienced violence to their role as state representatives. Three elements evoke the militia’s distrust: literacy, cell phones, and mobility. Reportedly, militias assume that teachers use these elements…
Background report
Competing Networks and Political Order in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Literature Review on the Logics of Public Authority and International Intervention
This CRP synthesis paper presents an overview of shifting dominant narratives on the Congo wars and the major findings of a systematic qualitative literature search on conflict and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in relation to the…
Book chapter
Urbanizing Kitchanga: Spatial Trajectories of the Politics of Refuge in North Kivu, Eastern Congo
This article presents the historical and political trajectory of Kitchanga town in North Kivu, to demonstrate how current processes of urbanization in a context of civil war in Eastern Congo are strongly intertwined with regional politics of refuge. Kitchanga, an…
Research paper
Humanitarian Fables: Morals, Meanings and Consequences for Humanitarian Practice
This article describes how events are turned into fables in humanitarian organisations. It explores how these fables circulate, the lessons they come to embody and their influence in maintaining an organisational status quo. The article argues that such stories teach…
Research paper
Humanitarian Shapeshifting: Navigation, Brokerage and Access in Eastern DR Congo
This article examines the experience of Congolese humanitarians negotiating access with armed groups in eastern DRC. It describes how humanitarians become shapeshifters: they play different roles for different audiences as a tactic of social navigation in a context of uncertainty.…
Research paper
From Rebel to Humanitarian: Military Savoir Faire and Humanitarian Practice in Eastern DR Congo
This article explores the experience of ex-rebels who have become humanitarians in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It describes how rebel-cum-humanitarians navigate a turbulent political environment, integrating the knowledge they acquired through military experience into a career in…
Background report
Guidance for Applied Cross-National Research in Under-Resourced Countries: Lessons from a Gender-Based Violence Intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Via a personal account of our experiences in conducting a study on a gender-based violence intervention in Congo, we share our lessons and offer recommendations (e.g., using multiple methodologies) for conducting applied cross-national research. We hope that as a result…
Research paper
Vigilantes, Witches and Vampires: How Moral Populism Shapes Social Accountability in Northern Uganda
Strange murders have occurred in northern Uganda. Blood is said to have been removed from the victims, and there are tales about child sacrifice and terrifying witchcraft. An ‘election’ was organised to select the culprit, known as ‘Mr Red’, and…
Research paper
Conceptual Resilience in the Language and Lives of Resilient People: Cases from Northern Uganda
This special issue explores post-conflict recovery in northern Uganda from the perspective of survivors themselves. Normative notions of resilience are widely critiqued as reductive, depoliticising and simplistic. Although the papers here, based on ethnographic methodologies, are largely sympathetic to this…
Research paper
Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: Understanding Rape in War and Post Conflict
Evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’…
Thesis
After rape: justice and social harmony in Northern Uganda
This thesis explores responses to rape in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, based on ethnographic research in two villages. Northern Uganda has been at the heart of international justice debates in the context of ongoing conflict between the Lord’s…
Research paper
War, Displacement and Rural–Urban Transformation: Kivu’s Boomtowns, Eastern D.R. Congo
This article addresses rural–urban transformations in the war-torn Kivu provinces. The spectacular growth and development processes of fast-expanding boomtowns in Kivu’s rural areas serve as an entry point to investigate the relationship between conflict, displacement, urbanisation and development in Eastern…
Research paper
The Politics of Return: Understanding Trajectories of Displacement and the Complex Dynamics of ‘Return’ in Central and East Africa
This introductory essay reflects on what studies of return can tell us about the ‘life cycle’ of conflict and displacement dynamics in war-affected Central and East Africa, with particular focus on Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda.
Research paper
Home Is Where the Heart Is: Identity, Return and the Toleka Bicycle Taxi Union in Congo’s Equateur
While many ex-combatants in the DRC continue to be re-recruited into militia groups, one group that has reintegrated successfully is the Toleka—a several-thousand-strong group of ex-combatants who returned (or remained) in the provincial capital of Mbandaka (Equateur province). The Toleka…
Research paper
Competition, patronage and fragmentation : the limits of bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri
People are affected by different kinds of insecurity in the Ituri Province in the northeastern DRC. This article investigates donor-driven attempts to improve security governance there. More specifically, it investigates bottom-up approaches to security governance in Ituri’s capital of Bunia…
Book chapter
Urbanisation and the Political Geographies of Violent Struggle for Power and Control: Mining Boomtowns in Eastern Congo
This chapter addresses rural–urban transformations in the Kivu provinces, DRC, and more particularly focuses on the complex relationship between dynamics of violent conflict and the emergence of urban mining ‘boomtowns’. Mining towns offer fascinating sites from which to investigate the…
Research paper
Between Tags & Guns: Fragmentations of public authority around eastern Congo’s artisanal 3T mines
This essay addresses the current dynamics governing access to artisanal mineral markets in eastern Congo’s two Kivu provinces, an area caught in over two decades of protracted and multi-scalar armed conflict. It examines how public authority is fragmented and (re-)shaped…
Briefing
Understanding Armed Group Proliferation in the Eastern Congo
Due to the proliferation of smaller armed groups and the disappearance and scattering of larger rebel movements, the armed group landscape of the eastern Congo has become increasingly fragmented. This fragmentation results from the interplay between the growing engagement of…
Background report
Stable Instability: Political settlements and armed groups in the Congo
This report analyses the stability, inclusivity and levels of violence of both the political settlement of the Congo as a whole and of political settlements in the conflict-ridden east. It shows that in each of these political arenas, armed groups…
