The gendered postconflict city: Possibilities for more livable urban transformations in Gulu, northern Uganda

ABSTRACT

Scholars acknowledge that postconflict urbanism is undertheorized and underdeveloped for practical governance or sustainable urban management, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which has unfortunately experienced significant conflict in the post-independence period. We argue that postconflict redevelopment theory and practice under appreciates liminal spaces and the precarious existence of postconflict people, especially postconflict women. We examine the extant literature on Gulu, Uganda, to develop theory and urban management concepts around the notion of the gendered postconflict city as a unique urban identity and re-center the analysis on the everyday experiences, agency, and city building practices of women. We posit three realities for understanding the gendered postconflict city: (1) the postconflict gendered city is a liminal space beyond the notions of contingency and fluidity often assigned to African cities, (2) it is a place of deep and abiding trauma, and (3) it is a place of invisibility and precarity for women who self-organize to reduce precarity. We make a series of recommendations for postconflict urban management based on these realities that include recognizing liminality in postconflict planning and setting aside the impulse to prioritize the global competitiveness of postconflict cities above all else. These have important implications for NGO and national development practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• gender
• urbanization
• postconflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term postconflict, without a hyphen, because new and emerging conflicts that are directly related to previous conflicts are common and continue to impact the lives of everyone in areas impacted by conflict. Like the term postmodern and postcolonial we use the term postconflict to suggest extended state of conflict characterized by multiple other forms of violence, injustice, disenfranchisement, and alienation from land and community.

2. See Virilio (1977) who suggests that the technology and logistics of war making are also the preeminent logics of city making.

3. The text of the petition can be found at www.justiceandreconciliation.org/uncategorized/2014/

womens-advocacy-network-petition/ (last checked 8 January 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John C. Harris

John C. Harris is Presidential Associate Professor of Regional and City Planning and Co-Director of the Center for Peace and Development at the University of Oklahoma. His work has examined informal urbanization, gender and peacebuilding throughout sub-Saharan Africa. He has worked for several years with women’s grassroots peacebuilding organizations in northern Uganda as they do the hard work of improving their lives and their communities. He uses multiple participatory methods to engage local communities in the co-creation of knowledge for advocacy and policy making.

Daniel Komakech

Daniel Komakech, PhD, is Deputy Director and Acting Director at the Institute of Research and Graduate Studies, Gulu University, Uganda. He is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow under Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda (IMAGENU), DANIDA Fellowship. He has led or been a member of several Economic Social Research Council and British Academy funded projects examining the connections between justice and sustainable development; youth and postconflict development, and postconflict urban migration.

David Monk

David Monk is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Humanities and co-chair of the Gulu Centre for Community-Based Participatory Research and Lifelong Learning at Gulu University, Uganda. Dr. Monk leads research in Vocational Education and Training and youth livelihoods in Gulu, and in youth solutions to climate change in Gulu.

Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

Maria del Guadalupe Davidson is Director and Academic Coordinator for Social Justice Affairs in the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences and Woodburn Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the West Virginia University. She has conducted grant funded research with several grassroots women’s organizations located in northern Uganda. Her co-authored articles on northern Uganda can be found in Gender and Development and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.