Peace versus justice: The peace process in West Nile / Uganda

The paper will discuss the complex, difficult and often antagonistic empirical relationships between peace consolidation, state consolidation, and justice or “positive peace” (Galtung). For a number of decades northern Uganda, and to a lesser degree Uganda as a whole, has suffered from a long-term “cycle of violence” (Elias) that has apparently ended in 2006 when the last of the major active rebel groups, the LRA, moved its remaining fighters mostly consisting of previously abducted (former) child soldiers to the neighboring Congo and CAR. During this long-term process balances of power as well as codes of conduct and sentiment as well as agencies and procedures of conflict regulation, that is to say violence-control, have changed (at local, supralocal/regional, and suprastate levels). It is adequate to speak of a decivilising process in North Uganda that has changed its dominant direction only a few years ago. Until today the activities and world-view of the LRA marked the climax of this long-term process in which diverse governments as well as various rebel movements have been entangled. A recently concluded field-research project was focused on the West Nile region. The peace process in this province was made possible by military successes, amnesty offers by the government (including the Amnesty Act of 2000) and a peace treaty with local rebels signed in 2002. Our findings show that while the peace or de-escalation process in this province was successful, there remains a protracted antagonism between the requirements of a “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of collective violence) and state consolidation on the one hand and those of a “positive peace” on the other, that would be compatible with the demands of justice and democracy in a more emphatic sense.