Social Torture
Описание книги
As Director of the Refugee Law Project at the University of Makerere, Kampala, Uganda, Dolan offers a behind-the-scenes, cross-disciplinary study of one of Africa's longest running and most intractable conflicts. This book shows how, alongside the activities of the Lord's Resistance Army, government decisions and actions on the ground, consolidated by humanitarian interventions and silences, played a central role in creating a massive yet only very belatedly recognized humanitarian crisis. Not only individuals, but society as a whole, came to exhibit symptoms typical of torture, and the perpetrator-victim dichotomy became blurred. It is such phenomena, and the complex of social, political, economic and cultural dynamics which underpin them, which the author describes as social torture. Building on political economy, social anthropology, discourse analysis, international relations and psychoanalytic approaches to violence, this book offers an important analytical instrument for all those seeking entry points through which to address entrenched conflicts, whether from a conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery or transitional justice perspective.
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Human Rights in Context
Research on human rights, or social and political issues closely related to human rights, is nowadays carried out in many academic departments, from law to anthropology, from sociology to philosophy. Yet, there is surprisingly little communication amongst scholars working in these different disciplines, and research that takes more than one perspective into account is seldom encouraged. This new series aims to bridge the divide between the social sciences and the law in human rights scholarship.
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Although the death rate and other impacts should have placed northern Uganda squarely on the lists of ‘deadly conflicts’ suggested by organisations such as the Carnegie Corporation in New York, it is not clear that the term ‘war’, as conventionally understood, adequately describes (let alone explains) what was happening. The fact that the elder quoted at the beginning of this chapter described people of Acholi as ‘in a dilemma’, a people who ‘don't know how to go forward’, is not surprising. The defining features were not the pitched battles between LRA and UPDF that conventional notions of war might suggest, but rather the phenomena of inexorably escalating displacement, dependency, debilitation, militarization, geographic reach and international involvement over time. Even humanitarians did not seem to grasp the extent of what was going on. It was only in November 2003, when the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs saw fit to describe the situation as worse than that in Iraq,58 that the gravity of the situation began to be acknowledged.
What the above account does demonstrate is that even by the late 1990s, President Museveni and his government, although in some respects exemplifying an ‘African renaissance’, in others remained in a weak position and faced a problem of control. Internal divisions juxtaposed with the fact that over 50 per cent of its budget came from external donors, made their hold on power considerably more provisional than was generally perceived. Nor could these internal and external pressures be dealt with discreetly, as they were closely related both historically and in the present.
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