of their own failings being exposed by using discourses to externalise, make public and thereby involve their constituencies in processes of institutional self-justification.11
Overview of the Book
The book is structured in the following manner. Chapter 2 sets out the institutional framework within which the research for this book was conducted, and the key elements of the approach adopted in order to address the contextual and conceptual challenges arising from doing research both on and in a ‘war zone’. To uncover the hidden rather than focus on the already visible, and to enable the emergence of a counter-narrative from those who are generally silenced by the mainstream discourses of the powerful, it was necessary to adopt an extremely open and non-prescriptive approach, in which the subjectivity of people living in that situation was given considerable scope and priority.
Chapter 3 serves a three-fold purpose. It begins with an objective history of major events occurring in northern Uganda over the period 1986 to 2006, including the various Governmental initiatives to deal with the LRA. It is ‘objective’ in the sense that few would dispute these happenings. This is then juxtaposed with peoples’ subjective memories to illuminate the importance of bringing subjective accounts into ‘objective’ history, for when this is done it indicates that although there were undeniably elements of intra-ethnic violence, there were no obvious reasons for giving primacy to an intra-ethnic explanation as there were also inter-ethnic, nationalist, international and trans-national dimensions. Rather than being lead actor, the LRA appears to be one amongst many.
Chapter 4 therefore confronts directly the argument that this is primarily a war between LRA and Government of Uganda, first through a consideration of the nature of the LRA, then through a review of the gap between the Government's stated intentions and actions. The LRA is seen as having both a certain coherence and an identifiable cause – not least to confront the Museveni government, as part of a rejection of wider processes of social and political change. It is also shown to have been more of a force to be reckoned with than national and international propaganda generally allowed. However, it is also shown to have been inherently self-limiting by virtue of its rejection of ‘modernity’. As an organisation it could in principle have been overcome by military means many years ago, and therefore does not offer a sufficient explanation for the continuation of the war. A review of the Government's approach to the 1994 Peace Talks – often cited as the closest they had come to a non-military solution prior to the peace talks which began in June 2006 – suggests that dealing conclusively with the LRA was never the aim of the Government and that its ‘peace talks’ were in fact a form of war-talk. Chapter 4 concludes that the main targets of Government policy and strategy were broader than the LRA and also extended to the Acholi population. The self-limiting nature of the LRA and the Government's lack of commitment to achieving peace allow the argument that this is primarily a Clausewitzian confrontation between two opposing groups to be substantially discounted, and suggest that the confrontation between LRA and Government, though real, is limited and is more important in its function as a disguise for a deeper process, namely social torture.
The following three chapters, which focus on the objective and subjective experiences of the bulk of the population in the war zone in Uganda, particularly in the protected villages, provide the evidence for this argument. They show how, in the name of protection, the population experienced on a mass scale, the key elements of torture, most notably violation (Chapter 5), debilitation (Chapter 6) and humiliation (Chapter 7).
Chapter 8, in reviewing this evidence, argues that in addition to those elements, dread, dependency and disorientation, are also evident throughout the war zone. In exploring these impacts it also becomes evident that while the LRA and Government were the two most visible parties to the situation, a multiplicity of other actors were also involved with differing levels of visibility and with different ways of making the situation function for them. Perpetrators, complicit bystanders and victims are all in place.
At the most mundane level the functions relate to the petty spoils of war-related corruption and the internal momentum of the ‘aid industry’. At a more important level they relate to the shifting balance of economic and political power within and between states in the post-cold war era of globalisation. In this context social torture supports entire processes of social and political change, and here again analogies can be drawn between the functions of individual and social torture. When considering the Ugandan state's relative vulnerability vis-à-vis its own population and within the wider international community, the contribution of social torture can be seen as three-fold. While hard-won political independence demands that states control their own populations, it offers little in the way of economic power with which to exercise this control. Other means therefore have to be found: demonization of individuals and sub-groups, and militarization in the name of pacification, provide important opportunities. The political need of the Government is for a process of subordinate inclusion (rather than social exclusion) of the population in northern Uganda. Insofar as it breaks down social practices which distinguish the war zone from the wider state (e.g. cattle-based restorative justice mechanisms) and replaces them with alternatives (e.g. the Local Council system), it gradually establishes the inclusion of the targeted social group into the national structure but on a subordinate basis. Insofar as these processes are publicised at a national level (as Chapter 4 suggests they are), they serve as a warning to other social groups in other parts of the country.
The aid and development donors, while talking of good governance, are in fact complicit in this process, as it serves their own need to maintain the Government of Uganda in a subordinate position. By allowing the client state to break with international conventions, a series of latent conditionalities are created that enable these donor states to exercise leverage and control over the client. Yet insofar as the Government is able to implicate external actors, it limits to a certain extent the powers of intervention of those external actors and thereby increases the Government's room for manoeuvre.
To support the vested interests which develop, complex mechanisms are in place to legitimise the process, including the use of the mainstream discourse on war. This discourse, and the careful silences about the vested interests of those promoting it, justifies a whole range of interventions (with the stated intention of doing good and the observed impact of doing considerable harm), and obscures the need for alternative interventions. The discourse and its silences are thus shown to be a form of violence.
The low intensity and wide impact of social torture, its geographical extension and time-indifference, its involvement of multiple actors and the functions it has for each of them, and the way the dynamics of violation become to a degree self-perpetuating (particularly in the sense that some victims themselves become perpetrators) all offer explanations for why the situation in northern Uganda continues. Taking all these different elements into account, it is possible to see that the fundamental process is one of social torture, but that this is disguised by the appearance of it being a war.
Chapter 9 explores the implications of this analysis. As a counter-narrative to the mainstream discourse on today's ‘wars’ it highlights the limitations of models based on binary oppositions such as ‘internal-external’, ‘greed-grievance’ and ‘rational-irrational’. It also highlights the practical limitations of legal approaches when it comes to dealing with multiple perpetrators, with the changing positions of perpetrators, bystanders and victims, and with the fact that people's behaviours are
