Analysis | What Northern Uganda Can Teach Us About Sustainable Peacebuilding
What do Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, and Congo have in common? Some would say the failure of international peace-support and peacebuilding interventions. Despite peacekeeping efforts, numerous post-conflict countries have relapsed into war, sometimes with even greater levels of violence. Even though this type of liberal peace process is dominant in the sector, one cannot but question why did they fail, and why external peacebuilding actors rarely create lasting peace in fragile post-conflict communities. Others would disagree and argue that the overall performance of peacebuilding has been fairly good in the past couple of decades, and in fact, the operations reduced the risk of renewed conflict. So, which one is it? Should top-down peacebuilding be praised or criticized?
The top-down approach to peacebuilding and development is the most widely-used and accepted format for an operation, and involves implementing decisions and directives negotiated at the highest levels between the local government and international stakeholders. In this fashion, there is a broad, readily-adopted diplomatic framework for operating in-country. The peacebuilding teams are usually in a ‘separate world’ that includes donors, the staff of international organizations, diplomats, and peacekeepers. They create a bubble with their own values, rules, and customs. Consequently, it prevents peacekeepers from living and working on the ground. This approach fails to consider the crucial and variable human and cultural elements of peacebuilding and development operations. It’s precisely this 60,000-foot view that causes these operations to fail so often. In failing to engage with the local and cultural practices throughout the peace process, top-down initiatives ignore their audience for the sake of the play.
Perhaps the best example of this paradox lies in the Sudanese conflict. Despite tireless efforts and tens of millions of dollars spent by international actors in Sudan and South Sudan, signs of a lasting peace have yet to surface. Concentrated almost entirely on engagement with Sudanese political leaders and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), international peacebuilding efforts continue to overlook local knowledge and local realities that might best inform their decision-making and enable direct engagement with affected communities.
In partial recognition of this, “participation”, “community”, “beneficiary-led projects” and “empowerment” have become buzzwords in the field of regional and international development and peacebuilding over the last few decades. But as some researchers argue, international development agencies are still working to find an effective way of delivering such projects without swinging from the untenable position of ‘we know best' to the equally untenable and damaging ‘they know best'. It is universally accepted, however, that local participation contributes to rebuilding social fabric vital for durable peace and cannot be ignored. Genuine engagement with local communities, discussion of peace at the local level, and joint conceptualization of paths to reconciliation are all vital steps necessary for teams to learn and adapt in order to successfully implement reconciliation and reintegration projects.
Even though this shift in thinking occurred more than two decades ago, it has yet to manifest in mainstream development and peacebuilding practices. Few examples of successfully-conducted participatory reconciliation projects that are practically based on local knowledge exist. Nonetheless, during my own fieldwork in Northern Uganda, I was afforded the opportunity to meet with peacebuilding practitioners who conducted a project that not only investigated and accounted for communal customs and rituals, but also partnered with cultural and religious leaders, called Ajwakas.
In 2016 Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) and the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) delivered the Supporting War Affected Women Reintegrate their Children through Family Reunions Project, applying a bottom-up approach. Given the number of female abductees and forced mothers of the Ugandan conflict (women who were kidnapped, raped, and forced into marriage and motherhood by male combatants) and the cultural taboo that accompanied it, I decided to dig deeper into the topic and examine how the project managed to succeed in such a delicate context.
In the early 1990s, a civil war characterized by extreme violence broke out in Northern Uganda. Rebel groups forced the population into submission by way of torture, child abduction, rape, massacres, and sexual slavery. Captives were compelled to violence and murder. One forced mother ‘was forced to kill and remove the heart of a woman who had tried to escape’. Children born of forced mothers were traumatized by the cruelty of life in captivity; their lives began in an environment plagued by war, human rights violations, misery, and deprivation. Even though there is now peace in Northern Uganda, the challenges that they face today are yet more complex; stigma, uncertain livelihoods, abuse, economic marginalization, and deprivation, among others. Some children born of the war even argue that their lives during the war were better than in peace.
To facilitate the reintegration of former abductees, WAN and JRP recommended enhancing the responsiveness of Acholi cultural institutions, community sensitization, and law enforcement. Their emphasis on cultural leaders should be commended. The official recommendation was that Ajwakas could use their influence to curb social stigmas surrounding forced mothers and utilize cultural practices to support their reintegration.
The initiative’s focus on Ajwakas demonstrated an understanding of the Acholi culture and the importance of rituals as a core aspect of interventions. The process of unlearning violence through rituals of spiritual cleansing in Northern Uganda is practiced by cultural leaders. As one Ajwaka explained in an interview, in Acholi culture, women are usually not considered ‘mad’, but as they were exposed to killing and violence in their captivity, they become ‘mad’ following the war's end.
As captives were forced by the authorities to perform violent acts upon people who tried to escape and those considered enemies as punishment — often in deeply dehumanizing ways. Therefore, the principal underlying reason for their societal rejection is the common belief that returnees are possessed by evil spirits called cen. It is believed that cen can easily be contracted from abductees, making them dangerous. Dr. Fiona Shanahan, Humanitarian Protection Adviser - Gender at Trócaire argues that ‘Spiritual or possession issues also surround the breaking of taboos surrounding rape, resulting in a curse or possession by a spiritual entity, which could result in the inability to reproduce’.
She supports her argument with the quote of an Acholi Elder who elaborated that the first thing that the community does when a girl returns is to question her about what kind of spirits she has been exposed to, considering the violence she has witnessed and survived. He confirmed that for the Acholi girl, the worst thing is to be exposed to sexual spirits. In the same article, Dr. Shanahan explains that the spiritual possession of the girl is understood as an echo of rape and that the spirit has physical power over the girl, controlling her behavior.
In an article published in Child Abuse & Neglect, Dr. Fiona Shanahan and Dr. Angela Veale, Director of the Child Studies Unit field offices in Ethiopia, illustrate how both mothers and children born during the war were reintegrated into society after achieving spiritual cleansing.
When asked to indicate the turning points in the lives of their children, all forced mothers mentioned the Nnyono tonngweno — an Acholi reintegration ritual.
It must be stressed that following spiritual cleansing, the project’s focus shifted to reintegrating participants with their paternal families to resolve the identity dilemma that children born of the war faced. The emphasis on the reunions of children with their fathers, again lies in local knowledge — in Acholi culture, one can only have societal acceptance and identity if they are accepted by their father. Stemming from the recognition of the innate human need for identity and self-determination, regardless of culture, the project sought to help participants re-establish a harmonious sense of self. During the one-year project, WAN and JRP project workers conducted 13 full reintegration processes and facilitated the children’s development of a secure self-identity. Other successful outcomes of this bottom-up project include more than 50% of children and 15% of mothers got access to land, and 45% of children and 16% of mothers got support welfare.
By learning and adapting to local contexts and culture, the intervention succeeded in reintegrating 13 people into society over the course of just one year of the project. In turn, the local knowledge and connections made enabled secondary objectives to be met by the end of the project, including provisions for access to land and welfare support for both mothers and children born of war. In addition, former captives’ violence can be regarded as learnt rather than innate, allowing for spiritually-led unlearning practices. As Dr. Shanahan explains, ‘the breaking of taboos or the committing of kiir (abomination) affects the sense of balance or social harmony in Acholi cosmologies. Social and spiritual actions are required to regulate this behaviour, in order to restore ‘nature’, balance or harmony’.
Unfortunately, in many instances, external actors do not take into account similar local values and belief systems when planning and delivering international peace and reconciliation interventions. With the top-down approach of liberal peacemaking efforts that fail to localize often comes local non-compliance, resistance, non-engagement and lack of trust. For instance, in 2010 in Luvungi, Congo members of a local militia gang-raped 387 civilians in their own homes with the U.N. peacekeeping base nearby. Since nobody who was supposed to protect these civilians was speaking French or Swahili, and given they had no previous contact with the locals, the victims did not trust the peacekeepers and were reluctant to approach them. This reflects the inherent power imbalance and lack of trust between external agents and locals, usually accompanied by dependency and paternalism. As a result, international reconciliation efforts become a series of ‘one size fits all’ interventions, rather than enduring initiatives that bring divided community members together by tapping into local resources and actively collaborating to create new realities.
Much can be learned from a discussion of spirituality and reconciliation with the Acholi people. This project is a great example of how the best results are achieved with projects that recognize communal customs, culture, and local knowledge which is often trivialized, while the knowledge of foreign experts is praised. Without the knowledge of the local language and lack of local understanding of the problem they are trying to fight, the peacebuilding interventions will keep failing.
It is imperative that humanitarian and international development organizations appreciate what is at stake if they keep running the show and do not adopt the bottom-up approach. In order to prevent another Luvungi, Rwanda, and Somalia, international organizations will need to change the way they operate and gather information. It is crucial to stop gathering information only from elites and foreign sources while living in fortified bubbles, but employ local staff on every level where possible. The focus must be upon developing trust, understanding local context, and creating positive relationships with local communities. Without this clarity of focus, aspirations for sustainable and wholesome peace will remain 60,000 feet above the communities they seek to heal.
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.
Photo Credit:
Market in Lira, northern Uganda, 2013 by Trust for Africas Orphans (TAO), Flickr,
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