Conceptual Resilience in the Language and Lives of Resilient People: Cases from Northern Uganda

ABSTRACT

This special issue explores post-conflict recovery in northern Uganda from the perspective of survivors themselves. Normative notions of resilience are widely critiqued as reductive, depoliticising and simplistic. Although the papers here, based on ethnographic methodologies, are largely sympathetic to this understanding, they also suggest that consideration of resilience should not be abandoned. The papers offer insights into how communities’ experiences and strategies of resilience often diverge from the ambitions of international actors. They demonstrate that micro-level studies of real people’s experiences of post-conflict recovery allow space for wider comparative and theoretical insights to emerge.

This special issue explores post-conflict recovery in northern Uganda from the perspective of survivors themselves. The papers compare and contrast emic and vernacular concepts of resilience, developed within the context of conflict survivors’ own lifeworlds and experiences, to those put forward within academic arguments, or underpinning much humanitarian-development programming.

The idea of resilience as an object for impact by development interventions, as debated in the academy, is now often critiqued as a convenient means of rebranding failed neoliberal programming. It is in principle reductive, depoliticising highly complex human ecologies while relying on simplistic economic, social, or psychological analyses of vulnerabilities to assorted crises and what it is that allows people to survive and recover from them. As Duffield presents it,

[The] pre-existing neoliberal turn in aid policy has been systematised and deepened through morphing into resilience-thinking. While neoliberalism and resilience are different, they now interconnect as parts of a shared conversation. … Usually understood as an ability to absorb external shock, resilience also implies a capacity to maintain system functionality during periods of stress and rapid change. Many of its social policy adherents, however, including those within the aid industry, would go further. The aim is not just to bounce back from rapid change and external shock; it’s to bounce back better (DfID 2011) … In neoliberalism’s post-security environments of uncertainty and surprise, disaster has become, quite literally, the new development. (Duffield 2012, p. 9).

The papers collected in this special issue are to varying degrees sympathetic to such a critical understanding of the resilience paradigm, as might be expected from their use of ethnographic-based methodologies. They allow insight into the inherent complexities of people’s lives and the diverse range of social, structural, institutional, environmental, and other impacts to which they might have been exposed.

Yet together these papers also offer a variety of reasons for not entirely abandoning the significance of resilience for understanding people in crisis. Consider the elderly Zande refugee ladies discussed in the paper by Hillary and Braak (2022). These women have spent their lives surviving and escaping the various eruptions of civil war since 1955 in what is now South Sudan, the world’s newest nation. It would be strange if they and others in similar situations did not reflect on matters of endurance in the face of the massive disruptions and crises that have seemingly shaped their lives. It seems likely that people whose lives have been shaped by conflict and displacement would think and talk about those things, internal to individuals or external, which have enabled them and others to survive and recover, and which differentiated those who coped and those who did not.

Collectively, the papers in this special issue explore what might be thought of as ideas of vernacular resilience and of imported ‘resilience’, and the space between them, often strategic and almost always normative. While a great deal has been written about resilience as an academic notion in disciplines connected to post-conflict contexts, especially psychology, cultural and critical geography, and international development, little has been written on the theme from the emic perspective of conflict-affected communities. This special issue is thus devoted to what we think is a new approach. This is not a diversion of indigenous effort in reaction to an imported and often colonial term, though it has been enabled through funding specifically awarded to critique academic notions of resilience. Instead, it explores the possibilities of (re)claiming the significance of how conflict-affected populations understand their own survival, and their own identification of the factors enabling their potential recovery. The relevance of local Ugandan and South Sudanese vernacular conceptualisations of and around resilience is suggested by the term’s common, everyday English use, which implies strength in the face of adversity and something more regenerative than either simple survival or endurance. It is potentially relevant to those who find ways to carry on with the ordinary business of life despite natural disaster or human conflict.

Northern Uganda and conflict

External perceptions of northern Uganda are largely shaped by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency, notorious for its brutality, longevity (including of the mass displacement it engendered) and the exoticism of its leader Joseph Kony. This conflict continued on Ugandan soil from 1986 to 2006 and led to around 1.8 million people spending up to a decade interned in displacement camps, for much of the period without services or support. The squalor, bleakness, and boredom of camp life was compounded by fear both of LRA abductions and massacres and of Ugandan army abuses (Dolan 2009).

Notwithstanding a massive internationally funded recovery programme for the conflict-affected areas from 2006 to 2012, perhaps the most enduring legacy of the conflict is poverty, even comparatively with most of the rest of Uganda, itself one of the world’s poorest nations. A recent survey found the Acholi region, epicentre of the conflict, now has the country’s highest poverty rates (UBOS 2021).¹ The course of the LRA war, which in the late 1980s saw the theft of the entire Acholi cattle herd by the army and Karamojong raiders, hollowed out the economy, and it has never recovered (Branch 2011). The social impacts of the long displacement and the need to reintegrate over 50,000 former combatants were both manifold and enduring (Allen et al. 2020). These emerge, for example, in ‘homeless’ people: those individuals who, lacking a family and clan identity, have no land to subsist on (Hopwood 2022).

As well as a degree of international awareness, partly resulting from the bizarre ‘Kony 2012’ advocacy campaign, the LRA war and related humanitarian interventions have received extensive academic attention over many years (Finnström 2012, Owor 2022). However, this is just one of the recent conflicts that have afflicted northern Uganda over recent decades, though the others are far less studied or widely known.

West Nile is situated in the far north-west of Uganda, populated by the Alur, Madi, Lugbara, Kakwa and Nubi peoples. The geographical isolation of the region from the rest of the country, exacerbated by the LRA war, has led to a regional identity shaped by adjacent South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), both of which have deep links fostered by trade and refugee exchanges. The people of the region experienced government persecution by the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA), the forces of the second Obote regime, in the 1980s, in retaliation against a population associated with Idi Amin. Amin was a Kakwa-speaker, who had toppled Obote in a coup and persecuted large sections of the population and the army on ethnic grounds. The violence, especially between 1982–84, led to cross-border displacement of a large proportion of the population (Harrell-Bond 1986, Leopold 2005). In 1994–97, the insurgent West Nile Bank Front, formed from the remnants of Amin’s army, along with other smaller groups, was active in parts of the region (Day 2011, Leopold 2005). More recently, cross border tensions between Uganda’s Madi people and the Kuku community of South Sudan have led to multiple deaths and displacement (Leonardi and Santschi 2016).

Karamoja, in Uganda’s north-east, is a low-rainfall region where the various Karamojong peoples have traditionally practiced transhumant pastoralism. During the 20^th Century, the population was largely ignored by both colonial and postcolonial governments, leading to very low scores on most development indices, on the one hand, but also facilitating cultural autonomy. As in some other East African pastoralist communities, cattle raiding is an historically important part of that culture, one that Gray (2000) interestingly framed directly in terms of resilience: because the harsh environment inevitably leads to the periodic loss of cattle through drought or disease, a community could restock their herds by raiding cattle from neighbouring Karamojong or cross-border groups such as the Turkana in Kenya, thus making them better able to survive. Moreover, in working against the build-up of massive herds and their associated localised over-grazing, raiding had an environmentally beneficial side-effect. However, automatic weapons became widely distributed in 1979 during the war to remove Idi Amin, and the impacts of armed raids – which had previously been relatively low-intensity – became increasingly problematic, both for security within the region and for the neighbouring communities of Acholi, Lango and Teso. The Karamojong have experienced multiple government disarmament exercises since 1948, but the most recent and brutal of these, initiated in 2006, had many features of a counter-insurgency exercise, including numerous extrajudicial killings and massive levels of human rights abuses (Stites and Akabwai 2009). A consequence of the disarmament campaign has been that the Karamojong have lost most of their cattle and now are facing the apparently permanent destruction of their way of life.

Furthermore, northern Uganda now hosts over one million refugees. A majority of these arrived in the country fleeing the South Sudanese civil war (2013–2018), many of whom have experienced multiple conflicts and displacements stretching back over 60 years, while a significant and growing number of refugees in the region have escaped from ongoing violence in north-eastern DRC (UNOCHA 2022). Refugee movements across the joint borders in this area have flowed in all directions over the years, sometimes – such as during the Second Sudanese and LRA wars in the late 1990s – even at the same time, creating complex and multi-layered relationships between the communities concerned. Uganda’s current public refugee response, held up as the gold standard by UNHCR (Titeca 2022) and much lauded internationally, manifests on the ground in messy and limited ways, as the often conflicting interests of government, UN and NGO staff, host communities and diverse and sometimes antagonistic refugee populations are all in play (O’Byrne and Ogeno 2020).

Thus, northern Uganda is at present home to a diverse range of communities with very different conflict experiences around duration, displacement, and long-term impacts. A similar diversity emerges in their experiences of assistance: while individual humanitarian-development projects tend to be ‘off the shelf’ and often look similar, the combined interventions in response to each conflict have varied widely in terms of scale, duration and emphasis.

Resilience in development theory and practice

The various periods of conflict and displacement outlined above are not the only shocks or crises northern Uganda has suffered or continues to experience. Growing landlessness, tiny local economies, and little prospect of inclusive growth condemn many to brief lives of extreme hardship. Moreover, the region’s population is experiencing the same problematic effects of climate change, rapid population growth, and environmental degradation common to the country as a whole and much of wider Sub-Saharan Africa. For some time now, humanitarian-development funders and practitioners working in the region have identified resilience-oriented interventions as the appropriate response to these various crises. Recently, however, framing programmes in terms of resilience is giving way to the language of climate adaptability, though the core content of programmes is often hard to distinguish from those of earlier years. This has meant that the marginalised populations of northern Uganda – and elsewhere – may have already encountered ideas of resilience in a different manifestation: that is, as the driving paradigm of humanitarian-development interventions of which they are the intended beneficiaries, as well as the academic conceptualisations underpinning these. These ideas have expanded and diversified in recent years and now dominate many humanitarian-development environments. Karamoja is a prime example here, and for a while almost every international intervention programme in the region seemed to include ‘resilience’ in its name, even those that were essentially unexceptional humanitarian responses to an effectively man-made famine (Hopwood et al. 2018). Their wider impacts, however, remain largely unevaluated.

Resilience, as used in development theory and practice, has been extensively critiqued as a deeply problematic term that obscures and de-politicises developmental problems, shifting responsibility for the crisis away from global or national structures of inequality and onto its local victims (Fabinyi et al. 2014, Welsh 2014, Meerow and Newell 2019). The anti-political nature of resilience theorising has been a recurring theme in the literature, in which the concept and its shaping of programming are seen to ignore and marginalise issues of local politics and the resource inequalities inherent within the global political economy more generally (Welsh 2014, Ilcan and Rygiel 2015, Harris et al. 2017, Zebrowski and Sage 2017, Ziervogel et al. 2017). Although development discourses often presuppose that strategies can be deployed to restore or build future resilience in places where it is lacking, these have been criticised for disguising the reiteration of previously ineffective interventions, reproducing, and reinforcing existing inequalities, or becoming co-opted by other problematic or normative agendas (Duffield 2012, Cretney 2014). The concept is itself proving resilient to such challenges, no doubt partly because of its usefulness to donors and development agencies in presenting essentially humanitarian interventions as developmental.

Development-oriented resilience literature is, of course, just one of multiple iterations across disciplines, and there has been discussion of its effectiveness as a bridging concept (Baggio et al. 2015, Ungar 2018). In the context of this SI, the use of the concept by the psy-disciplines, also controversial, is relevant, and is intimately interconnected with resilience in development (Duffield and Hewitt 2013). The slippery nature of the term allows for what amounts to a form of conceptual sleight-of-hand: just because resilience may be quantifiable in metallurgy and some other contexts does not make it so in developmental psychology, though there are schools of thought that try to make such leaps (Baggio et al. 2015).

There are, however, also a growing group of scholars exploring new and potentially more valuable applications of the concept. Hilhorst (2018), for example, sees resilience as the new humanitarian paradigm in which crisis has become the baseline, fundamentally redefining the international aid project; others have sought to reconfigure resilience as a process rather than an object, though perhaps with limited success (Béné et al. 2014, Harris et al. 2017); while Kelly and Kelly (2017) have sought to free the concept of its neo-liberal associations by presenting resilience as a potentially progressive and activist approach to politics at the local level.

Most significant for this special issue, however, are calls to ground resilience in bottom-up perspectives of those most affected by the circumstances of the concept’s utilisation. Cavanagh (2017) argues for greater acknowledgement of the cultural and moral relativism underlying so-called ‘positive’ resilience. Liao and Fei (2016) and Fabinyi et al. (2014) argue that the concept needs to be grounded in local and primarily ethnographic data. Vindevogel et al. (2015) highlight the inevitably normative and imposed character of resilience definitions, while seeking to validate this by grounding both research and interventions in the cultural and ethical values of the communities being studied or assisted. More recently still is a growing body of work linking resilience to locally grounded practices of resistance (Ryan 2015, Bourbeau and Ryan 2018, Sou 2022), an agenda, we suggest, that offers interesting and important new potential for ethically engaged research and programming.

Vernacular resilience

Many of the people who have survived conflicts could be reasonably described as resilient, in the ordinary sense of persevering and surviving in the face of extreme adversity. This is important, as whatever the problems with the notion of resilience in academia, the word still represents a feature of real people in the real world, perhaps in ways that can be usefully explored. It may be that these resilient people recognise individual or group characteristics or behaviours, or perhaps external or environmental factors, that are useful when it comes to facing existential threats; and that these have names in their languages or figure in their cultural traditions through stories or sayings. New words and concepts around resilience may have emerged in relation to enduring through conflicts and evolving threats. The authors in this issue all share an interest in the resilience (as the term is used in ordinary English) of East and Central African conflict survivors, and how this relates to their own comparable conceptualisations. From this starting point they critique or seek synergies in academic and humanitarian grey literature on notions of resilience.

A popular approach in development resilience discourse, reliant on its functioning as a bridging concept, is to focus on markets: the idea that a resilient market economy will translate in some way into more resilient communities and by extension more resilient individuals (Bernstein and Oya 2014). Working to create stronger markets in the absence of these corollaries might qualify as some version of development but would hardly be justifiable under the remit for equitable growth of humanitarian organisations.

Three of the papers here directly address this area. Ponsiano Bimeny (2022) discusses the impacts of a Mercy Corps (MC) programme to develop the sesame market in the Acholi district of Lamwo, remote and impoverished in the aftermath of the LRA conflict. Narrowly viewed, this project performed well, massively increasing the possible profits for sesame growers; yet even using MC’s own findings, the consequences for the Lamwo population included increases in land conflict, domestic violence, exploitation of labour and malnutrition in children. In West Nile, Elizabeth Storer, Innocent Anguyo and Anthony Odda (2022) explore the khat/marungi industry. Chewing the leaves and stems of the khat plant (Catha edulis) for their stimulant effects is widespread in East Africa, being an historically well-established cultural practice in many places. From a purely market perspective, marungi is an ideal crop, hardy, high value and consumed locally. Under moral pressure from religious and socially conservative political factions, however, the state has recently made its production and consumption illegal; although seemingly with little commitment to enforcement.

Failures consequent on a purely economic approach to resilience are amongst multiple illustrations of the complexity for humanitarian-development agencies of delivering positive programme outcomes. Bimeny, this time writing with Ngakaramojong speakers Benedict Pope Angolere, Saum Nangiro, Ivan Ambrose Sagal and Joyce Emai (Bimeny et al. 2021), reveal the self-inflicted handicaps of various development agencies in Karamoja through normative tropes, such as the notion of ‘reformed warriors’. The idea that an utterly foundational cultural identity, a key stage of life that all men must pass through and that defines concepts of masculinity, can simply be ‘reformed’ away is extraordinary. Such culturally blind approaches on the part of development actors appears ‘to neutralise and dismantle those aspects of communities that make them resilient to fundamental changes to their sociocultural, economic and livelihood strategies in the first place’ (p. 256).

The notion of the resilience of communities is essential in humanitarian-development programming: it seems unlikely that organisations could promote increasing the resilience of a few at the expense of, or even simply ignoring, the wider community, even if this is sometimes demonstrably the impact they have (Abonga and Brown 2022, Bimeny 2022, Bimeny et al. 2021). It is not that the papers collected here do not observe what might be called community resilience, but it emerges as often at odds with the values of liberal peace builders. Such resilience tends to be found in a community cohesion unsurprisingly dependent on shared cultural norms, beliefs and practices, which in rural African settings may include acceptance of patriarchy, witchcraft and various forms of violence.

Vindevogel et al. (2015) argue that, given its intrinsic normativity, resilience programming should be grounded in the norms, the ‘positively valued functioning’, of the communities being assisted. Francis Abonga and Charlotte Brown (2022) found impacts to celebrate in sports for peace programming in the Acholi region, yet still the benefits were not those assumed by programmers. Sports did indeed engage youth in ways they found beneficial, yet they also functioned as vehicles for social control of young people by their communities and in support of patriarchal values, diminishing girls’ access. Benefits were to a degree linked to psychological factors associated with fantasies of becoming a professional footballer in a context of minimal local opportunities to escape grinding poverty. Yet these fantasies were hard to sustain once projects ended for boys, while girls could never benefit in this way – there is no awareness of professional women’s football in rural Uganda.

The idea of resilience being associated with individuals’ states of mind recurs in several papers. Helle Harnisch (2022) describes young former LRA combatants whose coping abilities depend significantly on unrealistic fantasies about how they might escape the poverty and the social marginalisation of their lives. This is hardly unique to combat survivors, yet the idea of resilience being sustained by hope, however kept alive, is an important theme of the papers. Where circumstances render many people’s prospects, freedoms, and opportunities effectively absent, fantasy may be an essential element of preserving hope and hence resilience. As Abonga and Brown (2022) write, “where the ‘threats’ are diverse and seemingly perpetual … resilience is also tied to an idea that one can imagine possible alternate futures, which pose the opportunity for escape” (p. 239).

Other strategies also emerge, however. In their conversations with elderly Zande women, Isaac Waanzi Hillary and Bruno Braak (2022) identify low expectations as an essential strategy. These elderly women advise young people to accept the bleakness of their situation as refugees and advise them to focus on hard work undertaking simple tasks, personal faith, and taking comfort from caring for their own and others’ children, the rising generation.

The ideas Hillary and Braak identified among the Zande ladies resonate strongly with the practices of an Acholi Pentecostal church observed by Lars Williams (2022). Here, Williams describes the help which the church provides to individuals whose mental health has suffered through their exposure to conflict, in particular the LRA war. The church community offer these people a nurturing environment in which, through a programme of work, counselling, and prayer, they are, in effect, taught how to become resilient.

Storer, Anguyo and Odda (2022), as well as examining the economics of khat production, also talked to khat consumers. Here, again, there is a perspective that can easily be understood in terms of resilience: chewing khat helps users not only to cope with the effects of their exhausting daily manual labour, but also to build and maintain important social groups; as well as to bear the deleterious existential and psychological impacts which boredom and poverty have upon their everyday lives. Nevertheless, the impacts which users perceive as largely positive are also routinely condemned by opponents of khat, with its allegedly negative psychological and social effects being among the primary reasons which opponents mobilise to try and control its production and use.

Drawing on Scott’s ideas of Indonesian peasants’ survival strategies (Scott 1986), Ryan O’Byrne (2022) discusses resilience as expressed through the acts and practices of individual and collective everyday resistance to humanitarian and institutional fraud among South Sudanese refugees. Resilience here is manifested in various practical strategies. Although the majority of this ‘resistant resilience’ manifests as small-scale acts of survival needed to adapt to and survive the predatory actions of corrupt officials, some are community-wide actions definitively acknowledged as shared acts of resistance reminiscent of sumud, a political philosophy of resilience as resistance as politics in the occupied Palestinian territories (Ryan 2015).

A recurring theme of the papers is resilience as a socio-ecological system capable of adapting to and living with change while still maintaining its essential properties and functions (Beichler et al. 2014). These papers recognise that resilience can be a matter of learning the nature of local shocks and crises and then evolving individual or collective behaviours to better prepare for and deal with them when they reoccur (Allen, Atingo and Parker 2022; Storer, Anguyo and Odda 2022). This might be from as diverse strategies as playing sport (Abonga and Brown 2022) working hard (Hillary and Braak 2022), prayer and counselling (Williams 2022), or simply maintaining hope for the future (Harnisch 2022). As this special issue shows, however, not only can shocks be the result of the standard range of human and environmental causes, but they can also result from actions intending to do good, the negative outcomes of poorly conceived or sporadically implemented aid and development programmes (Bimeny et al. 2021, Bimeny 2022, O’Byrne 2022).

All the papers in this special issue reference vernacular conceptions related to resilience, and some focus especially closely on this. Hillary and Braak, Bimeny et al., and Allen, Atingo and Parker demonstrate the significance of a deep analysis of language, a hermeneutical approach to words and ideas as deployed in everyday speech rather than texts. These offer insights into communities’ experiences and strategies of resilience, experiences and strategies that often diverge sharply from the ambitions of international actors for them to ‘bounce back better’. This, perhaps, is where what community resilience actually looks like can be found, and as these papers illustrate, understanding it is essential if humanitarian-development actors are seriously concerned to do no harm. It is also, perhaps, a necessary step for academics interested in de-colonising academe.

Taken together, the papers in this special issue demonstrate that locally specific, micro-level studies of real people’s experiences of post-conflict survival and recovery allow space for wider comparative and theoretical insights to emerge. They offer an authoritative empirical perspective inasmuch as it is that of resilient conflict survivors, expressed and interpreted by members of those communities and/or outsiders who have spent extensive periods living and working with and among them. Moreover, in holding a shared, common theoretical conversation around issues of resilience in diverse yet adjacent post-conflict environments, they allow the special issue to offer an approach that can be taken up in other post-conflict or post-crisis contexts.

Acknowledgements

Most of the papers in this special issue are the result of research conducted through the Rockefeller Foundation/Institute of Global Affairs-funded programme Deconstructing Notions of Resilience: Diverse post-conflict settings in Uganda. A major concern of the project was to develop authoring experience and open up academic access among Ugandan and South Sudanese colleagues. This special issue is the result of these collaborations: most papers are authored or co-authored by Ugandan and South Sudanese scholars. Especially important has been generating space and opportunity for previously unpublished colleagues, particularly those who have had long and notable experience as professional researchers and brokers working on national and international research projects.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julian Hopwood

Ryan Joseph O’Byrne is a sociocultural anthropologist and post-doctoral researcher in the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA) at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Holding a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London (United Kingdom), his doctoral fieldwork took place in the South Sudanese Acholi community of Pajok while his most recent fieldwork has investigated the connections between mobility, resilience and public authority among South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda. He was a copyeditor for Anthropology Matters and Editorial Assistant and Indexer for the Routledge Companion to Cultural Property (Geismar & Anderson, eds). He has published in Australasian Review of African Studies, Civil Wars, Human Welfare, The Journal of Refugee and Immigrant Studies, The Journal of Refugee Studies, The Journal of Religion in Africa, Sites, and Third World Thematics. He has chapters forthcoming in Informal Settlement in the Global South, (Gihan Karunaratne, ed.) and Migration, Borders, and Refugees in Africa (Joseph K. Assan, ed.).

Ryan Joseph O’Byrne

Julian Hopwood has lived in Gulu, northern Uganda for much of the time since 2006. His current work is research and community engagement on land, environmental justice, and public authority. He works with London School of Economics’ Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and Gulu University, where he teaches on the Medical Anthropology programme. He recently completed his PhD at Ghent University on land ownership in Acholi. His earlier careers were in community mental health in UK and humanitarian-development work in Uganda.

Notes

1. Acholiland, home of the Luo-speaking Acholi people, is roughly the size of Rwanda, with a population of about 1.5 million. It was where the LRA originated and operated for much of the duration of the war, and the rural population of the west of the region was displaced for more than a decade.