Neither Peace nor Justice: Political Violence and the Peasantry in Northern Uganda, 1986-1998

Abstract: Uncertainty abounds concerning the 19-year conflict in Northern Uganda between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government. Two questions have received the most attention and could have the most bearing on efforts to resolve the conflict: first, why has the Ugandan government been unable or unwilling to end the war for nineteen years? Second, why has the LRA chosen to use extreme violence against the Acholi instead of trying to build popular support? First, this article addresses these questions, arguing that the debate has failed to take into account the political agency of the Acholi peasantry in the conflict and the relations between the peasantry and government, on the one hand, and the peasantry and the LRA, on the other. By putting the Acholi peasantry and its relations with government and rebels at the center of the analysis, the longevity of the war and the tendency by both rebels and government to use violence against the peasantry can be made sense of as a consequence of both sides' failure to realize an effective popular mobilization among the Acholi. Second, the article traces historically these failures of popular mobilization and the paths by which both the Ugandan government and the LRA came to see the population as a threat and potential enemy instead of as a potential support base. Third, by putting the people at the center of the analysis of the conflict, the groundwork is laid for putting the people at the center of the resolution of the conflict, transcending the current tendency of conflict resolution agendas to focus only on elites, treating the civilian population as passive bystanders or victims. INTRODUCTION (1) Uncertainty abounds concerning the 19-year conflict in Northern Uganda between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government. (2) Factual questions, such as the number of civilians killed, the rebels' troop strength, or responsibility for certain violent acts, receive wildly disparate answers. Moral and political questions pertaining to the LRA's mass abductions of children or their reign of violence against their own people, the Acholi, lead to even greater perplexity. Among the many questions, there are two that have received perhaps the most attention and that could have the most bearing on efforts to resolve the conflict. First, why has the Ugandan government been unable or unwilling to end the war for nineteen years?; Second, why has the LRA chosen to use extreme violence against the Acholi instead of trying to build popular support? In the first two sections, I will address the academic debates surrounding these questions. I will argue that the debates have for the most part failed to take into account the political agency of the Acholi peasantry in the conflict and the relations between the peasantry and government, on the one hand, and the peasantry and the LRA, on the other. By putting the Acholi peasantry and its relations with government and rebels at the center of the analysis, the longevity of the war and the tendency by both rebels and government to use violence against the peasantry can be made sense of as a consequence of both sides' failure to realize an effective popular mobilization among the Acholi. In the subsequent sections, I trace historically these failures of popular mobilization and the paths by which both the Ugandan government and the LRA came to see the population as a threat and potential enemy instead of as a potential support base. By "bringing the people back in" and placing them at the center of the analysis of the conflict--thus compensating for the current emphasis on national and international elites in explaining the Ugandan civil war--the groundwork is also laid for bringing the people back into the resolution of the conflict, thus transcending the current tendency of conflict resolution agendas to focus only on elites, treating the civilian population as passive bystanders or victims. …