Lorraine Dowler Nicole J Laliberte Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
Stabilizing Gender in a Post-War Context: Possibilities for peace in northern Uganda
This study investigates the ways in which post-war stabilization may perpetuate or even create new forms of gendered violence and inequality, even when explicitly attentive to issues of gender. Attempts to stabilize are attempts to normalize particular social relations and an analysis of these processes can be used to assess the priorities of those vying for power in the post-war context. In particular, an analysis of attempts to stabilize gender relations can be used to examine how gender identities are used to place some people in positions of power over others. Taking advantage of the transitional moment of resettlement in northern Uganda, this study examines the negotiation of power in processes of stabilization in the post-war landscape, the way gender is used within these negotiations, and the effect of these gendered processes of stabilization on people's lives.
This study asks how gender is constructed by the state, local organizations, and international agencies in Uganda to affirm their visions of stability. How do these visions vary by place, and how do their discursive and material manifestations affect people's lives? Finally, what role does the stabilization of specific social relations have on local strategies for realizing peace and equality? This research will apply feminist theory and critical development theory to the particularities of post-war landscapes in order to understand the shifts in authority, agency and violence that are associated with stabilization and reconstruction. This research will be conducted in collaboration with the National Association of Women's Organizations in Uganda (NAWOU). By using a qualitative methodology while working with NAWOU member organizations in Gulu, Pader and Kitgum districts, the study will be able to collect data on a highly transient population that has little trust in researchers. With the guidance of NAWOU, the findings of this study will be disseminated directly to local feminist organizations to contribute to their ongoing efforts for peace and equality in the region as well as national and international actors that are trying to create gender sensitive programming in the post-war landscape of northern Uganda.
This project contributes to feminist scholarship in multiple disciplines by investigating the theoretical disconnect between the investigation of the experiences of both men and women during a period of conflict and the experiences of those very same men and women in a post-war society as it undergoes the process of development. This project nests itself in the intersection of these two very important theoretical frameworks with the aim of not simply offering a better understanding of gender relations but a better understanding of how those gender relations are integral to sustainable peace. Furthermore, by using feminist geographic theory that critically engages with the concepts of place and scale, this research will connect global, national and local discourses with the on-the-ground material experiences of individuals to explore possibilities for peace. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Geography and Spatial Sciences Program and the NSF Africa, Near East, and South Asia Program (ANESA) of the Office of International Science and Engineering.
This dissertation investigates the cultural politics of human rights as they are tethered to processes of militarism, development and democracy in post-war northern Uganda. This research demonstrates how dominant narratives of the Ugandan war highlight the ethnic and religious motivations of the Lord’s Resistance Army while obscuring more ‘traditional’ state-based political claims. This ‘non-political’ narrative is realized by a discursive decoupling of scale whereby local events are separated from national and international processes. In so doing, the narrative justifies both the consolidation of state authority and imperialist interventions of international actors. My research challenges this narrative through a feminist geopolitical analysis that foregrounds embodied experience, troubles scalar constructions, and highlights place-based variations. Three themes were developed based on the data collected during this project and provide the framework for the analysis. The first, militarization and post-war landscapes, demonstrates how narratives and experiences of wartime social relations both shape the development of post-war interventions and facilitate the production of militarized spaces in so-called ‘times of peace.’ In particular, the means by which people are classified as villains, victims or heroes during the war shapes their experiences of post-war social relations and their abilities to affect change. The second, cultural politics of human rights, examines place-based variations in the interpretations and practices of human rights. I demonstrate how human rights, as both an institutionalized practice and unstable discourse, can be used to legitimize particular types of violence and citizenship. This work does more than question the universality of the rights model; it provides a map to the landscape of cultural politics in which the tool of human rights is embedded. Finally, my research reveals paradoxes within the peaceful emotional geographies in the region to simultaneously illuminate everyday spaces of agency and the territorial unevenness of national and international interventions. This work sits at the nexus of the burgeoning geographies of peace literature and the growing scholarship on emotional geopolitics. Collectively, the results of this study reveal the centrality of identity in the design and justification of post-war interventions. In the case of northern Uganda, violence that was blamed on the local Acholi population during the war led them to become the targets of non-violent conflict resolution training in the post-war era. This occurred at the Government of Uganda and its international allies, particularly the United States, were pursuing military campaigns against the Lord’s Resistance Army in distant locales. This study exposes the contradictions of such divergent post-war interventions. In so doing, it provides analytic tools relevant to the work of local, national and international actors with which they can identify such contradictions and assess the ways in which constructions of identity are used to legitimize violence during times of both ‘war’ and ‘peace.’
