Research Articles

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Cow Economy: Reconstituting the Balalo Cow Economy Debate
(RM Transitional Communities Research Discussion Paper Series., 2023-04-01) Komakech, Daniel
Drawing from the current debate on nomadic pastoralists, particularly on the Balalo, we observe that the bigger problem is that, the Balalo and the nomadic pastoralists’ cow economy, are not able to articulate the rationale of their occupation from a policy language. Besides, nomadic pastoralist economy has since been an informal and not a formal sector and consequently, not understood and considered therefore as economically unviable. We argue that nomadic pastoralist economy is nevertheless, a system that is not anarchic or backward and therefore, not different from other modes of the economy. As a system, it is coherent and rational, with different parts, including a grazing corridor, which once disturbed results into multiple challenges. This is what we are witnessing today, with the case of the Balalo nomadic pastoralists. Similarly, the social, economic and ecological features that enable pastoralist economy and the contribution of the pastoralists to the national economy cannot be considered in isolation, because it is an integrated system. The indigenous economy and knowledge as well as scientific / capitalist economy and knowledge, are all co-existent within the landscape of cow economy. For example, the ecological value of cow and animal movements has been observed as extremely important. Consequently, there is a need to establish: Uganda Livestock Authority (ULA) and a research based Uganda Livestock Research Institute (ULRI), to reinforce the appreciation of nomadic pastoralists as well as, cow economy.
Imagining futures/future imaginings: creative heritage work with young people in Uganda
(Journal of the British Academy, 2023-11-02) Moles, Kate; Baker, Will; Nono, Francis; Komakech, Daniel; Owor, Arthur ; Anek, Florence; Pennell, Catriona; Rowsell, Jennifer
Drawing on research in Uganda, we describe our project in which we invited young people to think about their lives in ways that opened up creative and hopeful imaginaries of the future. We understand future imaginary work to be a significant part of memory work. An important component in the ways we think about the past is imagining the futures it ties to. We wanted the idea of the future to be something our young participants constructed together, in dialogue and iteratively, so that the project had a sense of collaboration and shared interests. To do so we developed the idea of a touring exhibition through which multiple voices, positions, understandings and values could be accommodated side by side. The article contributes to scholarly and public debates about reparations and memorialisation, particularly by showing the crucial role young people can play in articulating more just futures.
Dealing with COVID-19 in Africa - Culture and homegrown approach, social enterprises, human rights, and country-related issues
(Research at the University of York St John, 2020-07) OBIKA, Julaina; NDAYISABA, Leonidas; TROUILLE, Jean-Marc; TROUILLE, Helen
The securitisation theory has been used variably to explain global affairs. However, in securitisation literature, the ‘audience’ remains under-researched, often treated as passive and without agency. The Coronavirus, which hit the entire globe in unprecedented ways, has put different types of governments and leaders to the test. Countries around the world are experiencing or experienced either partial or total lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus which saw infections in the millions and deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The government of Uganda, in particular, opted for a total lockdown, with only essential services allowed to operate. Between mid-March and July 2020, President Yoweri Museveni had addressed the nation 16 times, including a state of nation address where he reiterated the lockdown restrictions and guidelines for citizens. At the beginning of the lockdown, Museveni instituted state security machinery to make sure the guidelines were strictly followed. In this paper, I will argue that in Uganda, COVID19, a public health issue, was co-constructed as an existential security threat that inspired motivation and drew animosity from different publics (audiences), with public trust gaining and waning. Governing this animus became the preoccupation of Museveni’s government during the lockdown, putting him at the center stage
Returning to the world of ancestors’: death and dying among the Acholi of Northern Uganda, 1900s–1980s
(Routledge, 2022) Obika, Julaina A.
The encounters between Acholi and Europeans, beginning in 1904 with the settlement of the Church Missionary Society in Acholiland, had a profound impact on the people. Scholars have long examined the impact of these encounters on various aspects of life. But a study of their impact on mortuary practices in the region has largely been neglected. Recently, scholars have shined a spotlight on death and dying as a result of the armed conflict that engulfed Acholiland from the late 1980s. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, interviews, and works of Acholi intellectuals, this article complements this new trend, by focusing on death and mortuary practices between the 1900s and the 1980s. Specifically, it recreates these practices and demonstrates change and continuity; and it concludes with a history of the cemetery in Acholiland.
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war Editing for effect in northern Uganda
(RAI, 2014-08) Meinert, Lotte; Obika, Julaina A.; Whyte, Susan Reynolds
After two decades of conflict and internment in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), the Acholi people have returned to their homes and are trying to heal their wounds after the long war in northern Uganda. Bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, cultural organizations, and religious institutions are involved in the politically and personally sensitive work of reconciliation. Yet for most people, the actual restoration of peace lies in establishing an everyday life and being able to rebuild relationships with kin, friends and neighbours. In a collaborative project with an installation artist, the authors collected personal voice accounts of these ‘social repair’ processes and audio edited them in order to share them with a local public. The editing process raised critical issues regarding ‘editing for effect’, which are of wider relevance for discussions of ethnographic representation and social processes of editing past experience. As a way of crafting and controlling material, editing is always ‘for effect’. But the authors were struck by the powerful potential of this artistic editing and by the difficulty in foreseeing or controlling its consequences among listeners. They suggest that personal processes of forgiveness resemble processes of editing, in the sense that past experience is revised and given narrative form, with an effect on the present and future of social relationships. When we edit, we foreground and background segments of data and experience and cut parts of our representations. We do so while deciding something is irrelevant and other aspects should ‘stand out’ for the receiver and ourselves as more important.
I Forgive to Forget”: Implications for Community Rest get”: Implications for Community Restoration and Unity in Northern Uganda
(University of South Florida, 2018-04) Obika, Julaina A.; Ovuga, Emilio
The hard work of reparative futures: Exploring the potential of creative and convivial practices in post-conflict Uganda
(Elsevier, 2023) Moles, Kate; Anek, Florence; Baker, Will; Komakech, Daniel; Owor, Arthur; Pennell, Catriona; Rowsell, Jennifer
In this paper we empirically explore the ways in which young people were enroled in a multimodal exhibition to creatively produce narratives of their past, presents and futures. We look at the different ways this work was framed, and how all memory work and, we argue, future work is relational, interactionally produced and situated in dynamic and unfolding social and political frameworks. We look at the ways young people described the work of producing accounts of their futures within that setting, and the different forms of labour involved in that process. We explore the encounters that fostered local, more humble, acts of care and repair, and how those everyday practices might help build towards reparative futures.
The ‘Intimate Governance’ of Land in Northern Uganda
(Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2022) Obika, Julaina A.
After the war in northern Uganda, conflicts over land became pervasive. Families, clans, and neighbours often relate through tensions and contradictions over customary land and how it is governed. This article discusses the changing gendered dynamics of the governance of customary land amidst land conflicts in a post-war society. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Pader District in the Acholi sub-region, carried out between 2014 and 2016, the paper highlights strategies used by different categories of women involved in land conflicts to perform, communicate, and activate their belonging and attachment to land. Relating the notion of property to how women (re-)position themselves in land conflicts and (re-)construct those positions and their identities on and through land demonstrates how these conflicts in post-war northern Ugandan offer women a way of grounding themselves on customary land. The article therefore advances the notion of ‘intimate governance’ to understand, in particular, women’s increasing role in land governance, suggesting that it is becoming (en-)gendered through land conflicts.
Two marriages, two speeds: Disruptions and connections in post-conflict Gulu cityscape
(Journal of Sociology and Development, 2021-12-15) Komakech, Daniel
Drawing from urban studies and conflict studies with specific focus on transitional justice sphere of return and reintegration, the paper elaborates on the existing complex disruptions and connections in coupling among former Lord’s Resistance Army returnees in Gulu city, northern Uganda. Deploying new conceptual tools, namely, the materiality and vitality of “kavera (polythene bag) that the men instrumentalise to negotiate a relationship with the women and also how women use “browning” technique (a metaphor built on a local emphasis on “brown is beautiful”) to attract and retain men, we think through coupling in the post-conflict Gulu cityscape to understand and enhance the complex dynamics involved and negotiated, making coupling among the returnees, fleeting and therefore, swinging in a centrifugal manner. Consequently, we contend that coupling amongst the returnees in the everyday cityscape of Gulu is open-ended and that the concept and the persons oscillate between "narrowing and expansion, ambiguity and precision” (AbdouMaliq and Pieterse 2017: x). In that sense, both the concept and the persons are elusive and has its own logic, with its terms of reference expanding and contracting as far as it can bend (AbdouMaliq and Pieterse 2017: 159). Therefore, instead of a normative or ideals of coupling, rather, we should think in terms of the everyday production and practices of ‘couple-making’.
The gendered postconflict city: Possibilities for more livable urban transformations in Gulu, northern Uganda
(Journal of Urban Affairs, 2022-08-10) Harris, John C.; Komakech, Daniel; Monk, David; Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe
Scholars acknowledge that postconflict urbanism is undertheorized and underdeveloped for practical governance or sustainable urban management, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which has unfortunately experienced significant conflict in the post-independence period. We argue that postconflict redevelopment theory and practice under appreciates liminal spaces and the precarious existence of postconflict people, especially postconflict women. We examine the extant literature on Gulu, Uganda, to develop theory and urban management concepts around the notion of the gendered postconflict city as a unique urban identity and re-center the analysis on the everyday experiences, agency, and city building practices of women. We posit three realities for understanding the gendered postconflict city: (1) the postconflict gendered city is a liminal space beyond the notions of contingency and fluidity often assigned to African cities, (2) it is a place of deep and abiding trauma, and (3) it is a place of invisibility and precarity for women who selforganize to reduce precarity. We make a series of recommendations for postconflict urban management based on these realities that include recognizing liminality in postconflict planning and setting aside the impulse to prioritize the global competitiveness of postconflict cities above all else. These have important implications for NGO and national development practices.
Tenywa Aloysius Malagala
(Taylor & Francis, 2009-09-18) Tenywa Malagala, Aloysius
Health is a fundamental human right that has great impact on the full realisation of other human rights including economic rights. In order to promote the health of the people and to increase the productivity of the population in a more sustainable way, there is need to do more than simply providing medical facilities and preventing and treating ailments. There is a need to address the injustices that occur in the relationships between the health service providers and the patients. Crucially, there is a need to address the stigma and discrimination, and all other health-related issues that hinder the full realisation of the right to health of vulnerable members of society in Uganda. A human rights-based approach to health is perhaps more likely to be effective, inclusive, equitable, sustainable and efficient in addressing such obstacles than other approaches. This approach calls for: a) recognition of the national and international human rights framework; b) empowerment and active participation of all stakeholders in all matters pertaining to their health; c) accountability; d) equality and non-discrimination; and e) progressive realisation of the right to health. Thus, human rights principles must guide the analysis, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of health promotion programmes in Uganda.
COVID-19 Prevention Measures: Impact Stories and Lived Experiences of Uganda-based Refugees
(Vienna Journal of African Studies, 2021) Okot, Betty J.; Tenywa Malagala, Aloysius; Awich Ochen, Eric; Muhangi, Denis; . Serwagi, Gloria K
The COVID-19 pandemic is making new demands on society to become more aware of humanity’s oneness and collective vulnerability. The disease has instigated a catalogue of health communication initiatives focused on prevention and containment. Tentative solutions such as social distancing, face masking, hand-washing, and lockdowns have seemingly become the mantras of safety and prevention. Moreover, staying safe entails going against the everyday normal and nearly doing away with that which, defines humanity, namely: socialising (even physical contact), thus, leading to compliance dilemmas. Relying on findings of the mixed methods socio-behavioural study, “Knowledge, adherence and the lived experiences of refugees in COVID-19:A Comparative Assessment of Urban and Rural Refugee Settings in Uganda,” hereafter REFLECT. We show that refugees are in a constant dilemma of choosing either to comply with prevention measures or maintaining the everyday normal. Hence, we reflect on how the prevention-related social restrictions might be increasing refugee vulnerabilities by disrupting their everyday normal. We question whether it is appropriate to view non-compliance as a deliberate act of defiance on the part of refugees when their current positionality hinders amenability. We conclude that, it is vital to understand how refugees’ lived experiences and socio-economic pressures lead to compliance dilemmas.

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