Adam Branch

Winning the War, But Losing the Peace? The Dilemma of SPLM/A Civil Administration and the Tasks Ahead

The debate over peace in Sudan has centred on the ongoing talks in Naivasha, Kenya. This paper argues, however, that sustainable peace is not simply a function of the implementation of an agreement between the SPLA and Khartoum, but that other fracture lines will run through post-conflict Sudan. Here we draw attention to the rupture between the Dinka, dominant within the SPLA, and the Equatorian peoples of the far south, hundreds of thousands of whom were driven from their homes or faced with economic and political oppression under SPLA occupation. As these refugees return, it will be through local government structures that Equatorians will or will not be integrated into the SPLA political project for Southern Sudan. Thus, local government figures prominently in the possibility for sustainable peace. We describe the origins and structure of local government in Southern Sudan, situating it in the history of political tension between Dinka and Equatorians. We then describe the challenge of equitably distributing land and foreign aid to returnees in the context of ethnic politics and a massive NGO presence.

Gulu in War … and Peace? The Town as Camp in Northern Uganda

This paper begins by exploring the unique place of Gulu Town within the 20-year civil war in northern Uganda (1986–2006). It describes the conditions faced by the large internally displaced population of Gulu during the war and explains why the town has remained relatively stable despite the massive influx it experienced of uprooted rural Acholi. The paper explores the social changes that have occurred among the displaced population within Gulu’s tenuous urban environment, focusing on the breakdown of male, lineage-based authority and on the impact of town life on women and ex-rebels. Finally, the paper charts the changes in displacement patterns that have occurred in Gulu since the end of the war as a new landless and marginalised population seek haven in town and as social conditions and tensions, instead of improving, worsen with peace.

Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Camp in Northern Uganda

This article shows how international humanitarianism and state violence developed a sustained relation of mutual support during the civil war in northern Uganda. This collaboration was anchored in the archipelago of forced displacement camps, which at the peak of the war contained about a million people, and which were only able to exist because of, first, the violence of the Ugandan state in forcing people into them, preventing people from leaving, and repressing political organisation in the camps; and, second, the intervention of international humanitarian aid agencies, which fed, managed, and sustained the camps for over a decade. The consequence was that state violence and international humanitarianism each depended on the other for its own viability.

Against Humanitarian Impunity: Rethinking Responsibility for Displacement and Disaster in Northern Uganda

Abstract Given that humanitarian organizations can often be responsible for enabling, prolonging or intensifying violence and conflict through their interventions into war zones, it is important that these organizations, despite their presumed neutrality and beneficence, be held accountable for the deleterious consequences of their actions. The case of northern Uganda will be used to demonstrate how humanitarian agencies have made possible the governments counterinsurgency, including its policy of mass forced displacement and internment, which has led to a vast humanitarian crisis. The Ugandan government policy will be assessed as a war crime, making aid agencies accessories to this crime. This case study is used as an example to highlight that processes which demand the post-conflict accountability of those responsible for violence may be dramatically incomplete, and unjust, if they do not include the humanitarian agencies. In conclusion it will be suggested that if humanitarian organizations built popular accountability mechanisms into their daily operations this might prevent them from being complicit with egregious violence in the first place.

The Paradoxes of Protection: Aligning Against the Lord's Resistance Army

ABSTRACT Protection has risen to prominence over the past decade in fields from humanitarian practice to military operations. Its rise, however, has been characterized by a lack of clarity over what it means in practice. This article attempts to discern the politics of protection by examining a specific case: the international effort to protect civilians from the Lords Resistance Army. It argues that the initiatives being mounted to protect civilians from the Lords Resistance Army should be seen as efforts to constitute and experiment with new forms of transnational political authority, specifically unaccountable, militarized administration networks that bring together state, international, and substate actors and institutions.

Human Rights NGOs in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions (review)

In the opening chapter of Human Rights NGOs in East Africa, Kenyan lawyer and scholar Makua Mutua, also the editor of the volume, decries the fact that “[t]he human rights movement in the region is a rump extension of the so-called international human rights movement, which originated and is headquartered in the industrial democracies of the West.”1 Many authors in this important volume echo this same concern; they argue that the human rights discourse and practice dominant in Africa today fails to respond to the continent’s particular social, political, economic, and historical situation. Instead of being specific to Africa, they argue, this dominant discourse and practice is primarily a Western import, often imposed on Africa by foreign donors. The politically and normatively counterproductive consequences of the extraversion of human rights in Africa are convincingly charted by Human Rights NGOs in East Africa; as Mutua writes: