The Legacy of Violence in Uganda and the Role of the Church towards Peace

I Introduction

According to the Human Security Report (HSR) published in 2006, the number of violent conflicts waged around the world has declined since the beginning of the 21^st century, and this trend has been by far great in Sub-Sahara Africa¹. Even though the number of armed struggles that broke out in the 1990s doubled compared to the previous decade, their termination has increased as well. Significantly, and in contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, many conflicts were ended through settlement rather than victory, which mark a considerable turn. As for the 1990s, the HSR identifies 42 violent conflicts which were ended by negotiation and 23 by victory, as well as 17 negotiated settlements and four victories in the period from 2000 to 2005. Many of these negotiated settlements occurred against the backdrop of UN peacekeeping missions which rapidly expanded at the time. While these numbers are encouraging they do not allow for much triumphalism. Even if settled conflicts last on average three times longer than those which ended by victory, they are nearly twice as likely to start up again within the first five years.

Again the backdrop of these sobering statistics is important to ask how the termination of a violent conflict can lead to a more sustainable peace. One crucial aspect lies in the impact of the termination of conflict on the communities concerned. With special reference to intra-state conflicts in Africa we have in Part C of this work examined the three approaches of settlement, resolution and transformation in order to explore how they link the termination of conflict with a long -term social change. We have also examined the traditional conflict management in Africa for its effectiveness and limits. Dealing with the past of violent conflicts through employing the mechanisms of transitional Justice, reconciliation and Unification to assess their impact on transforming violent conflicts was also of particular interest to us in this section.

II Violent conflicts in Africa in general

In African societies -as in all others- what causes conflict is complex and multi-faceted. According to Egohosa E. Osaghe, at the micro level, conflicts between ←25 | 26→individuals, families and lineages erupt over personal differences and quarrels, marital disputes, rituals or over the competition over scarce resources such as Land and pasture. At the macro level, conflicts often occur between governments and opposition groups as well as on the clan and village level². Against the backdrop of widespread poverty in Sub-Sahara Africa, conflicts over belonging and identity frequently merge with attempts to control often-scarce economic resources.

Nevertheless, violent conflicts in Africa have undergone significant changes since the end of the colonialism and the accompanying liberation struggles, and they continue to change over time, often in relation to the changing global contexts. Robert Luckham argues that since the 1990s, the scale of violence has increased dramatically, in particular regarding atrocities committed against civilians³. Large scale terror campaigns including killing, rape, displacement and the destruction of living spaces are common characteristics of wars such as in Sudan, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sierra Leon and Liberia. In addition to immediate war-related fatalities among combatants and non-combatants, many people die due to the immediate consequences of war, such as poverty and malnutrition, AIDS infections due to rape or poor sanitary conditions during displacement, encampment and detention. Furthermore, For Alex de Waal, conflicts in Africa tend to be geographically unequally distributed, frequently affecting one part of a county or region more than another and they often have either a “war next door” or have a “war before”⁴. This is tragically exemplified by the war in the DR Congo (1998–2003) in the Great lakes Region, where eight African nations and some 25 armed groups were involved, causing the death of an estimated 4 million people.

Despite much literature on the causes of conflicts in Africa, they remain intractable and difficult to predict⁵, says Elisabeth Porter. Some analysts according to Mats Berdal and David Malone argue that changes in the working of the global economy after the Cold war have lead to the so called new wars⁶. They suggest that conflicts are no longer fuelled not only by grievances and a sense of injustice regarding the treatment of a particular social group but also by greed. This greed in the words of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffer manifests itself in the exploitation ←26 | 27→of natural resources, taxation of humanitarian aid, the funding of combat by Diaspora communities abroad and the like⁷. Consequently, they argue, waging warfare is less an outbreak of hatred and resentment than an acquisitive desire to maximise gains. Cramer says; it is thus a rational choice⁸. For Mary Kaldor, other features of “new wars” include the pursuit of identity politics and the exclusive claims to power on the basis of tribe, nation, clan or religious identities, often build on communities that are “invented” rather than “discovered”⁹. In contrast to the “old wars”, the aim is often no longer the victory on the battlefield, but to create a pure and unified nation. Since with the exemption of Rwanda, this does not necessarily lead to a genocide the terms “ethnocide” and “politicide” have been coined to describe the deliberate destruction of social groups who share either cultural or political characteristics. Darfur in Sudan serves as a sad reminder of what consequences these strategies can have.

Yet, despite the relevance of the concept of “new wars”, the emergence and continuation of civil wars in Africa remains much more complex. In addition to economic gains, the rationale -rather than rationality- to fight is highly dependent on cultural, personal and historical aspects, which cannot be explained by the “new wars” frame work. It is therefore important to understand the role played by social processes in intra-state conflicts. In many cases, they point to a degree of continuity with “old wars” and require a highly nuanced understanding of how various old and new aspects work together to make people take Arms¹⁰. Instead of simple explanations, as argued by Paul Richards, violent conflicts must be considered as a social process in which the boundaries between war and peace are constantly negotiated¹¹.War twined aspects of social reality. The occurrence of a violent conflict is deeply embedded in the historical and social continuities that run through a society and that influence the mutual perception of the parties to the conflict¹². Consequently, the emergence of violent conflicts has to be situated in the precise Social context from which it emanates¹³. In Africa, this ←27 | 28→often runs along cleavages introduced by colonial powers. Against the backdrop of limited resources and manpower to fully administer the conquered territory, many colonial administrators opted for a “divide and rule” policy according to which they selected one part of a society, elevated its status and used it to govern the rest of the polity. As a result, this so-called strategy of indirect rule left deep cleavages between privileged and suppressed sections of the population that-in many cases-have not been overcome to date. In the post-independence period, these cleavages often formed the basis of party politics and political alliances, firmly establishing the divisions in the political structure of the societies. In present history, they give rise to the contestation of citizenship rights for some parts of society as well as to power struggles. Among other factors, they lie at the heart of the genocide in Rwanda, as well as the violent conflicts in Uganda, Burundi and Nigeria, to name but a few.

III Inventing war

According to Vivienne Jabri, identities are constructed representations of the “self” in relation to the “other”¹⁴. Implicit in this statement are at least two assumptions worth investigating more closely: first, Jabri suggests that identities are not realities waiting to be possessed, but rather they are constructed over space and time, and second, she points to the relationship between identity and difference as the locus of conflict. Regarding the first point, it is central to Jabri’s argument that identities do not derive from biological proclivities, but rather from being situated in a particular discourse. This social and historical context provides “a variety of pre-existing experiences, implicated in human conduct through practical and discursive consciousness” out of which the individual actively selects particular modes of representation¹⁵. It is hence not autonomous agency or rational choice that guides the selection; rather it is the individual’s belonging to a spatio-temporal community that defines who she or he is and how she or he acts. In her argument, Jabri borrows from Giddens’s structuration theory that suggests that social practice is ordered across space and time. Again, social action is not the result of the actor’s rational choice, but rather derives from her properties, in the form of “rules and resources, or sets of transformation relations, organised as properties of social systems”¹⁶. In Giddens’s structural ←28 | 29→properties “structure only exists internal to …practice and as memory traces orientating the conduct of knowledgeable human agents”¹⁷. However, Giddens does not suggest that structural properties determine agency. Rather, social systems, which provide the structural properties, consist of reproduced relations between actors that have been organised as social practices¹⁸. For Giddens, all social life is generated in and through social praxis; where social praxis is defined to include the nature, conditions and consequences of historically and Spatio-temporally situated activities and interactions produced through the agency of social actors¹⁹. There is therefore an important circular movement between agency and structure which forms the main contention of Structuration theory.

Crucial to the idea of structuration is the theorem of duality of structures… The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality. According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise. Structure is not “external” to individuals…Structure is not to be equated with constraints but is always both constraining and enabling²⁰.

In other words, the moment of the production of action is also the moment of the reproduction of structural properties simultaneously, even in times of the most radical change²¹. Yet this is not to suggest that structures are merely constructed by action, but rather that actions reproduce them as conditions, as rules and resources, that makes agency possible. So one important insight that derives from Giddens’s structuration theory is that structural properties come into existence through agency as much as agency is constituted through structural properties. And yet, in order to have some impact on structural properties one single act is insufficient-only through repeated action, over space and time, is the agent able to exercise some influence. As we shall see in the course of this work, repetition has a significant ontological impact. The identity of agents is informed and conditioned by the prevailing structural properties of a particular discourse. And yet, since it is agency which shapes the structural properties, non-conformist action might become powerful by gradually transforming the prevailing “reality” into a different one over time. According to David Campbell, ←29 | 30→this might happen through constantly judging and acting, that is, through the permanent provocation of wide -ranging structural practices²².

Returning to Jabri’s notion of identity construction, the argumentation adopted in this book is that agents are historically situated and that their actions are enabled and constraint by the particular structural properties, or discourses to use a synonymous term. This recognition has an impact on both the way people invent as well as un-invent war. Against this backdrop, the existence of belligerence and hatred can be considered as a structural property which has developed in a community over time and which can potentially be un-made. This, however, requires change.

The second assumption implicit in Jabris’s argument above is that there is a “relation” between the construction of self and other. Even though Jabri’s texts reveal little about this relation, Susanne suggests that unravelling the construction of identify along the line of identity/difference provides valuable insights into the emergence and ending of conflicts and, therefore, merits closer attention. According to William E. Connolly, the importance of the other for the self is that the self simply would not exist without the other. Without difference there would be nothing to contrast ourselves. In Connolly’s words: An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognised. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in this distinctness and solidity²³.

Difference is hence indispensable for identify. For Campbell, “The constitution of identity is achieved through the inscription of boundaries which serve to demarcate an “inside” from an “outside”, a “self” from an “other”, a “domestic” from a “foreign””²⁴. Andrew Linklater adds that Social systems are constructed along the line of inside/outside where exclusion at each level influences the other and is shaped by it²⁵. The spatio-temporal representation gives us a particular identity since we have to draw lines between where we stand and where there is space for somebody else. Here and there, now and then, we and they become meaningful in light of this “effective geography” where loyalty and allegiance is ascribed to those we associate ourselves with²⁶. Hand in hand with this process of identity creation, however, goes the claim for legitimacy and the notion of rights ←30 | 31→for “since we have come to exist we believe we have a right to exist”²⁷. This right to exist can only be challenged by somebody who is not a member of my particular identity group. It can only be the indispensable other who has the ability to deprive us of our identity.

So far we have established that the existence of a self is ultimately linked to an other. Inside the spatiotemporal boundaries, identity is produced and reproduced through routinised practice. Agency is meaningful for it is conducted along the lines of collective memory traces which allow for knowledge among the members of a discourse. This raises the question how the construction of the self influences the relationship between identity and difference. In order to explain conflict as situated in the prevailing discursive and institutional continuities of a community, Jabri introduces the notion of conflict as “constructed discourse”. Again in accordance with Giddens’ structuration theory, she suggests that conflicts are not events that suddenly occur, but rather that they are situated in a discursive environment. Pre-existing structural properties supply the necessary foundation to justify and legitimise the emergence of and involvement in conflicts. Myths, memories and symbols not only provide the ground from which identity is drawn, but they also narrate the tale of the other as enemy and threat²⁸. These exclusive discourses about the inside/outside split of community boundaries are likewise embedded in discursive and institutional continuities and serve as justification for the practice and politics of exclusion²⁹. But where do these exclusive discourses originate? Why was the other created as an enemy? Is it simply the existence of difference which provides the basis for conflicts?

In an attempt to respond to these questions, Campbell argues that “the problematic of identity/difference contains…no foundations which are prior to, or outside of, its operations”³⁰. Instead conflict arises on the level of the boundaries which are supposed to provide distinctness and solidity for the respective identities, and which are not always originally clear cut. As Connelly notes: “if there is no natural or intrinsic identity, power is always inscribed in the relation an exclusive identity bears to the difference it constitutes”³¹. This power is manifested in turning the indispensable other into the evil other. “Identity requires difference ←31 | 32→in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty”³².

Connolly hence argues that the paradoxical element in the relation of identify to difference is that we cannot dispense with personal and collective identities, but the multiple drives to stamp truth upon those identities function to convert difference into otherness and otherness into scapegoats created and maintained to secure the appearance of true identity³³.

Hence according to Connolly, communities which are uncertain about their own identity have a tendency to affirm this identity through increasing the difference between members and non-members leading to an exaggeration of the differences. Devoid of pre-existing coherent identities, the individual or the community is inclined to demarcate itself from the other³⁴. This boundary drawing between self and other is thus central to post-positivist conflict analysis. In consequence, the promotion of peace has to tackle the prevailing social continuity of exclusion by changing the nature of the boundaries between inside and outside.

IV Emergence and support of violent conflicts

In linguistic terms Jabri locates the support for post Cold War conflicts in the “discourse of origins” where elites “hark back to a distant past in order to mobilise a bounded, exclusionist present”³⁵. She argues that authorities and elites hold the power to control which discursive and institutional practices prevail inside of a community when she writes that the ability to consolidate and reproduce authoritative power is dependent on the capacity to manipulate the memory traces of community and control information gathering and dissemination which generate and reproduce the discursive and institutional communities which “bind” societies³⁶.

The “binding” of societies can be based on a hegemonic discourse which does not allow for dissent voices, and it may consist in demonising anybody who is not a part of the “We-group”; a process of boundary drawing and demarcation is set in motion. Due to the overlap of signification, legitimisation and domination, plural communication is no longer possible; it is distorted and becomes ←32 | 33→exclusive. Jabri makes special reference to the state, a highly administered social system, as central to both the reproduction of war through the manipulation of the public discourse, as well as through the institutionalisation of the war process³⁷.

Yet the difficulty with Jabri’s argument is that it credits too powerful a role to the elites. Her argument resonates with David keen and Mats Berdal’s study of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to which a range of elites initiate violence in order to deflect political threats³⁸. They suggest that the growing internal and external pressure for democratisation puts the mere existence of dictatorial governments in jeopardy, and in order to secure their position governments frequently incite violence along ethnic lines. Due to a general lack of discipline and effective counter-insurgency military forces, there is a tendency to oppose the flaring-up of rebellion through the mobilisation of “top-down” violence, “with elites taking advantage of fear, need and greed of ordinary people to recruit civilians”³⁹. Ethnic identities provide a useful vehicle for motivating violent conflict; existing discursive and institutional provisions are deployed to cut a gap through a community serving as a “regressive political function”⁴⁰.

Similar to Jabri, for keen and Berdal the authority held by elites provides the necessary power to steer the perception, or discourse, of a community into a particular direction. However, the frequent occurrences of insurgencies, as opposed to government led wars, suggest that there are also actors outside of governmental institutions. Moreover, as central to the previous chapter, the occurrence of violent conflicts is internal to societies, and not external to them⁴¹. To solely attribute the potential of manipulating discourses into violence and exclusion to governments and elites reduces the multiple and diverse agents in a social field. As a consequence, it is not the case that “anything goes” when it comes to manipulation. Unless it is in line with a generally prevailing sentiment in the population, propaganda and hate speech incited by individuals does not necessarily lead to widespread violence. For here too, agency is constraint (and enabled) by structure. The genocide in Rwanda for instance, an often cited example to illustrate the degree to which people can be manipulated into committing the ←33 | 34→most horrendous crimes against humanity, was based on ethnic polarisation first politicised through German and Belgian colonial rulers and then radicalised after independence. In addition, it was carefully prepared over many years, and it occurred not only in the middle of a civil war and the corresponding extreme polarisation, but also in the context of flawed peace process. The action of killing was thus situated in a “long-duree” of fighting and hatred and not merely the result of spontaneous Hutu conspiracy.

Despite these critical remarks there remains a powerful role for discourses in the emergence of violent conflict. In response, much of post-positive conflict analysis is concerned with exploring how rituals of power have arisen, taken shape, gained importance and affected politics⁴². Campbell, for instance, draws on Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction to illustrate the workings of power of relations. Deconstruction is perhaps best explained through what is not: it is not the negative task of demonization, and it is also not a simple dismantling of an entity into small parts⁴³. Furthermore, deconstruction is not criticism in a general or Enlightenment sense of faultfinding, nor is it a scientific or philosophical method based on a metaphysics which can be applied to a particular case⁴⁴. Deconstruction can be explained as the reading of a text in a way that “opens up the blind spots or ellipses within the dominant interpretation”⁴⁵. Generally, texts are written in ways that exclude alternative perspectives; they make claims to reflect a particular reality authentically so that they introduce a sense of closure, which stifles alternative interpretations. Deconstruction reveals these limits and invites plural, alternative interpretations. Drawing on the deconstruction of texts, Campbell shows how narratives about the violent Conflict in Bosnia reflect particular accounts of Bosnian history which are conditioned by a selective understanding of ontological presumptions about ethnicity, nationalism, identity, violence and so on⁴⁶. Ignorant of their ontological selection, the texts introduce closure on a multiple interpretation of history through developing a particular truth, or meta-narrative, devoid of contestation. The value ←34 | 35→of deconstruction is hence to open monopolistic accounts and to reveal their contingent character.

Ultimately, Campbell’s use of deconstruction seeks to challenge “the relations of power which, in dealing with difference, move from disturbance to oppression, from irritation to repression, and …from contestation to eradication”⁴⁷. He calls for a different configuration of politics in which the overriding concern is the “struggle for alterity”, in which eradication is replaced by the nourishing and nurturing of antagonism, conflict and plurality⁴⁸. In other words, Campbell is concerned with celebrating difference through “the proliferation of perspectives, dimensions and approaches to the very real dilemmas of global life”⁴⁹ and he seeks to “contest the drive for a new normative architecture-especially in form of newly minted codes and principles-as a necessity for responses to the context of crisis”⁵⁰. The importance of deconstruction for conflict analysis is that it allows for opening up closed discourses as multiple sites in which difference is not suppressed but appreciated. Its emancipatory potential is to challenge prevailing, that is structures of inclusion and exclusion, drawing attention to what has been stifled and offering an opportunity for silenced voices and opinions to emerge. The question remains, however, whether challenging structures and meaning is sufficient in war-torn societies. Once the prevailing power structures have been contested, may be even violently, are they to remain open? In fact, can they remain open? Is nurturing antagonism, conflict and plurality possible, or indeed desirable? Despite appreciating Campbell’s concern with challenging boundaries and opening up closed discourses this work argues that, regarding violent conflicts, he does not recognise that people need a sense of identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of limits and boundaries. Not for reasons of “human nature” or “human needs”, but simply because, otherwise, sociality would be impossible. For interaction to be meaningful, shared concepts of “language games” are required⁵¹. ←35 | 36→This is of particular importance for the time after a violent conflict when a new, peaceful future has to be developed and when the social structures that formerly made up the world and provided meaning are destroyed. For “Wars unmake worlds, both real and conceptual”⁵². Worlds cannot be simply recreated but have to be created anew since recreation would merely reproduce the tensions that led to the violent conflict⁵³. After the violence, the creation of new identities can happen in antagonism or mutual acceptance of the other party to the conflict, perpetuating or reducing the potential for future violence. Often, though, antagonism prevails since the experience of bloodshed and loss has marked people deeply, rendering group identifies even more relevant than at the beginning of the hostilities. Hence, in many cases after a war both parties to the conflict end up trapped in collective identities⁵⁴. This resonates in Vakim Volkan’s concept of “chosen trauma” according to which a group draws a traumatic event into its very identify in order to reproduce its collective identity⁵⁵. The repetition of narratives about the traumatic event constructs the group’s identity in opposition to the identity of the opponent who caused the trauma, and as such becomes a social reality for those who participate in this discourse. A Common identity, a “we-feeling”, is shared between the people who recall the same painful past, rendering their social integration meaningful, while reproducing their boundary towards the outside⁵⁶. This maintenance of antagonistic relationships keeps societies vulnerable to future violence.

The potential for reproducing antagonistic relationships between the parties to the conflict shows that, even though the cessation of fighting is often considered ←36 | 37→as the endpoint of peace process, it marks nothing more than a beginning⁵⁷. In cases where the parties to the conflict continue living in closer proximity to each other, such as inter alia in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Guatemala or El Salvador post-conflict transformation requires some form of intervention of new structures to prevent a new outbreak of violence. For “wars…only really end when they are transcended, when they… [go] beyond the traditional currency of victory and defeat; when the defeated side… [accepts] that the victory of its enemy… [is] also its victory as well”⁵⁸. In an ideal case, the transcending of a war does not simply result in the new distribution of power; rather, it challenges and changes the power structures themselves. It does not merely invert the level in which the power structures are newly defined and no longer rely on the exclusion of one party at the expense of the other. Conflict is then positive, for it challenges boundaries, and it is also positively constructive for it leads to newly invented ways of relating to each other. To move from conflict to peace is thus not sufficient to deconstruct exclusive power structures, leading to plurality and diversity, but it is at the same time also necessary to change theses structure and antagonisms, moving the parties to a new level beyond enmity. This has so far been largely ignored by post-positive approaches to conflict studies and shall be addressed in the section-inventing peace.

V Conclusion

In this first part of my work we see clearly that violence in Africa in general is not something abstract but a reality. It existed and exists in the families and villages due to differences in opinion, due to struggle over land and pasture, and it exists also due to struggle over women. Violence existed among clans due to desire to expand ones territories and dominate others. Violence exists until today in governments due to differences in opinion between governments and opposition. Violence today exists also not just as a means to redress grievances but often it is simply the result of greed- the desire to have more. We also saw how war is invented-it doesn’t come abruptly but it is a process. It begins with building ones identity and drawing boundaries through creating difference. These boundaries demarcate the inside from outside, the self from the other, and the domestic from the foreign, thus exclusion of the other. The construction of self influences ←37 | 38→the relationship between identity and difference and difference turns out to be seen as otherness, as scapegoat. This creates a duree of hatred and eventually fuels conflict and fighting. We have also seen the tendency to see all who do not belong to the “we group” as enemies and to be fought. We have also seen here in a small manner that Peace making here will involve tackling existing prevailing social exclusions and changing the boundaries between inside and outside and also adapting deconstruction to reveal the limits of closure and invite plural and alternative interpretations. So accommodation, inclusion, tolerance will be the words preferred here. This will however be treated in detail under the subtopic covering peace, Part D of our work.