Eria Olowo Onyango, University of Bergen

CHASING THE SHADOWS OF STATE:
Cattle Raiding, Violence and Disarmament in North-Eastern Uganda

Abstract:
The last three decades have witnessed an extraordinarily high level of violence in northeastern Uganda. It is argued that the violence is mainly orchestrated by cattle raiding, banditry and interethnic conflicts among the Karimojong pastoralists. For a very long time, these pastoralists have been subject to extreme political and economic marginalization forcing them to resort to their traditional practice of cattle raiding. Since the colonial era, the successive regimes have failed to address the persistent violence resulting from this cattle raiding which is now being exacerbated by small arms trafficking in the region. Attempts to employ non-violent approaches to bring the endemic violence to an end have miserably failed. And yet attempts towards using forcible disarmament of the actors have not only failed but escalated the local conflicts by bringing in another actor – the army. This paper argues that perhaps the greatest problem is not the culture or the modern weapons or the army but the state itself. The persistent violence in the region is a result of the absence of the state in the region as occasioned by not only its dysfunctional institutions but also by its ‘shadow’ presence which the Karimojong are seriously contesting.

Profile:
Eria is currently a PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. The title of his thesis is: Pastoralism and Conflict in African Drylands: Confronting persistence violence in an armed society; the case of the Karimojong in North-eastern Uganda. Eria has just concluded his doctoral research among the Karimojong pastoralists in north eastern Uganda where he looked at the historical and political processes driving persistent violence in the region. He is now writing his doctoral thesis. He has also worked on violent conflict under MICROCON project, a five-year research programme funded by the European Commission. The programme takes an innovative micro level, multidisciplinary approach to studying the conflict cycle. Under this program he has also done ethnographic research on the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) conflict in northern Uganda in which he attempts to put into perspective how gender identities are constructed to facilitate violence and ways in which they are manipulated before and during violent conflict to support the aims of different actors. Eria has been an assistant lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Makerere University in Uganda since 2002.

For more information, please visit: https://www.uib.no/personer/Eria.Onyango
You can also meet Eria informally in an encounter after the seminar in the Corner Room where, as usual, beverage will be served.

All interested are welcome!