We Are Sons and Daughters of Bwoc': Refusal and Land Rights Protections in Rural Post-Conflict Acoliland, Northern Uganda (WGF - Post PhD Research Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Seven years after the guns ceased to thunder in Northern Uganda, and four years after people left the squalid displacement camps to return home to their 'ancestral' lands, clans in rural areas in Acoliland began to create their own non-profit foundations. In doing so, many clans have had to contemplate, debate, and finally write their foundations' constitutions, mobilizing, translating, and negotiating indigenous knowledge and governance into this alternate form. These initiatives have emerged as a widespread, yet unproven, strategy in the area to address pressing contemporary social issues for members of the clan in post conflict and post displacement contexts, and congruently, in face of what has been called 'the global land rush' (RRI 2012); as a major impetus to the foundations' creations is the eventual pursuit of communal, formally titled land. A part of what I conceptualize as social repairing through refusal, these initiatives draw attention to emerging and transforming ideas and practices of relatedness, including indigenous governance, in context, and ultimately centers and questions the importance of land pressures, both internal and external, to re-elaborations of relatedness-- specifically in response to violence--through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

File Information