The Politics of Space and Relationality: Localization and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Uganda

ABSTRACT

The article aims at remapping the relationship between Global North and Global South spatial politics in relation to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, in the Ugandan post-conflict setting. Our analysis of ‘localization’ draws on understandings of space as a ‘cartography of power’ (Massey), relational approaches and three categories of space, namely representations of space, spatial practices and representational place-space. We argue that representational agentic spaces offer openings for subverting gendered and racialized dichotomies, as it is in these dynamic hybrid place-spaces where agency is generated through shared values of care and community across global-local WPS worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid space
• localization
• relationality
• Women, Peace and Security agenda
• action plans
• Uganda

Introduction

The politics of space, seen from a women, peace and security perspective, has at its heart the plural competing narratives about where the WPS lives (Shepherd 2020, 456), e.g. at the UN Security Council headquarters in New York, at the African Union (AU) in Ethiopia, at the state level in Uganda or with the women’s organizations and local women’s groups in Uganda. UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 as the founding resolution of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda was adopted with support from African countries. Namibia had a workshop on gender and peacekeeping in 2000 which led to the adoption of the Windhoek Declaration and Namibia Plan of Action for gender mainstreaming of peacekeeping efforts. Furthermore, UNSCR 1325 was adopted during Namibia’s Security Council presidency with the support of African femocrats and lobbying from women’s organizations in the Global South, especially Africa. By September 2023, African actors have drafted around one-third of the 106 National Action Plans (NAPs) worldwide to implement UNSCR 1325 (Peacewomen n.d.). The first NAPs outside Europe were also located in Africa (Cote d’Ivoire and Uganda in 2008). Several African countries have adopted second and third-generation NAPs. Yet, the African voices have been erased in competition with the narrative that the Nordic countries were the ‘first movers’ to adopt NAPs (Denmark adopted a NAP in 2005 followed by Norway and Sweden in 2006), even though the thinking of UNSCR 1325 was adopted in African policy documents before then, e.g. the Maputo Protocol in 2003 (Kirby and Shepherd 2021).

With NAPs being seen as the international solution to make up for the shortcomings of implementation, localization has become a dominant narrative in WPS policy circles. Recently, localization has become institutionalized in the discourses of the UN as well as the AU. The UN Women global study on the implementation of WPS (UN Women 2015, 15, 250) emphasizes the importance of localized and participatory processes for peace and maintains that localization should be ‘the major policy directive of international actors going to the field’ (394). A report from the AU also acknowledges persistent challenges related to the localization and implementation of UNSCR 1325 (African Union 2020, 8).

Scholars have however highlighted the problematic nature of assumptions about localization (Acharya 2004; Barakat and Milton 2020; Chilmeran 2022; Shepherd 2020). Firstly, localization involves a focus on scale – geographically as well as in terms of power and resources ‘to emphasize their relational, nested and political nature as sites of women’s participation in an international intervention setting’ (Chilmeran 2022, 748). However, ‘the local’ actor is neither powerless nor devoid of resources (Barakat and Milton 2020, 154). Secondly, localization also implies a focus on process where global norms are translated into local practices by norm-makers and -takers (Acharya 2004) – a journey that is not unidirectional. Lastly, localization is framed in instrumental and neutral terms masking power struggles over ownership of the WPS agenda and framing ‘the local’ as merely the context of WPS efforts (Chilmeran 2022).

The article is situated within the peacebuilding literature on the ‘hybrid’ and ‘local’ turns (Forsyth et al. 2017; Mac Ginty 2010; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Peterson 2012; Wallis and Richmond 2017), as well as the more recent ‘spatial turn’ (Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1989). For our focus on space, peace and security we draw on the work of Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel (2022) and scholarship on the ‘relational turn’ with an emphasis on emplaced security and indigenous approaches (e.g. Brigg 2020; Brigg and George 2020; Brigg, George, and Higgins 2022; Brown 2020; FitzGerald 2023) and explore how the ‘politics of space’ manifests in the context of WPS in Uganda. Earlier contributions to the gender-space-peace nexus came from feminist geographers (e.g. Brickell 2015; Mahon 2006; Massey 1994; 2004; 2005), but the contributions from WPS scholars have been relatively few (e.g. Achilleos-Sarll and Chilmeran 2020; Chilmeran 2022; George 2017; 2020; George and Kent 2017; McLeod 2015; Shepherd 2017), with a limited range of case studies from the Global South, e.g. Serbia (McLeod 2015), Fiji (George 2017), the Solomon Islands (George 2020) and Sierra Leone (Martin 2021). More case studies from Africa with a specific spatial reading of gender, peace and security would therefore enhance our understanding of the diversity of relational approaches in the Global South.

Working from Massey’s (2005) notion of a ‘cartography of power’ that emphasizes the political nature of space as well as her framing of places, regions, nations and the local and the global as being relationally forged (Massey 2004, 5), we extend the gender-space-peace/security debate by focusing on the manifestation of the politics of space across scales in hybrid peacebuilding spaces such as Uganda. We contend that – since the local is already imbricated in the global – binaries and hierarchies of scale can be overcome by harnessing the positive transformative power of a combined analysis of three interrelated spatial categories, namely hegemonic metageographical discursive spaces of representation; the hybridity of peace arrangements in the everyday practice space marked by frictional encounters between actors across local, national and global scales; as well as grounding or emplacing security and peace in ‘place-spaces’ of the local and indigenous. We argue that representational agentic spaces such as the latter offer openings for subverting gendered and racialized dichotomies, as it is in these dynamic hybrid place-spaces where agency is generated through harnessing shared values of care and community. The study, therefore, asks, how such a theorizing of WPS space plays out in an African/Ugandan setting, and what are the implications of these insights for new ways of doing WPS? The nebulous nature of the ‘local’ opens the concept to epistemological abuse and it is therefore important for WPS scholars and advocates to consider the implications of seemingly innocent invocations of the ‘local’ through terms such as ‘localization’, thinking carefully about both language and who the local WPS might be (Achilleos-Sarll and Chilmeran 2020, 596). The challenge to WPS is therefore to overcome not only the neglect of space, but also the fact that space as well as the study of peace and conflict have been traditionally constructed in a Eurocentric way – abstracted and decontextualized.

We selected Uganda as a case study as it constitutes a ‘critical case’ (Flyvbjerg 2006), which may apply to other cases with similar characteristics (e.g. Liberia or Rwanda) based on the assumption that if deep localization, i.e. based on relational ontologies of connectedness of people to place-space is not taking place in Ugandan WPS policy and practice, then if will probably not take place in similar cases. The specific characteristics of the case are firstly that Uganda strongly promotes global WPS norms as well as localization. In Uganda, the principal peace negotiator was Betty Bigombe, a Northern Ugandan woman and former minister in the government, who in 2005 prepared a draft peace agreement accepted by Museveni. Although the 2005 peace negotiations fell through, her contributions laid the foundation for the Juba Peace Talks (2006) between the Museveni government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Women’s organizations formed a coalition called the Juba Peace Caravan (Chigudu 2016, 28; Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 176). Secondly, Uganda is a society which came out of conflict but is not yet at peace, in the sense of persistently high levels of gendered insecurities. Finally, well-documented collective local practices on peace and human security exist.

The article is structured as follows: First, we theorize the links between gender, space, hybridity and peace/security with reference to three spatial categories, namely representations of space, spatial practices and representational agentic place-space. We then use these theoretical insights as a lens for analysing examples of localization strategies from Uganda. In this empirical section, two co-constituted themes emerge. The first theme captures instrumentalized discourses and practices from above, emanating from global as well as national and local elites. The second theme comprises localization via relational discourses and material practices from the everyday, where agency is grounded in the place where specific communities ‘already find themselves’ (Brigg 2020, 539). The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of positive hybrid spaces for new directions in WPS research.

Theorizing gender, space and hybridity in peace and security

The ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences (Lefebvre [1974] 1991; Soja 1989) has foregrounded the multiple ways in which spatiality bears significance beyond the materiality of geography to include social relations. Space is thus conceptualized as essentially a ‘product of interrelations constituted through interactions’ (Massey 2005, 9) or global-local frictional encounters characterized by ‘contemporaneous plurality’ (9) and fluidity (13).

While we concur with Massey’s assessment of fluid categories, for the sake of analytical clarity we briefly distinguish between scale, space and place. Scale refers to the vertical or layered/nested organization of space socially produced by discourses, practices and power structures (Mahon 2006; Wallis 2020, 479). In terms of scale, our focus is on the interdependent and co-constituted relationship between the local and the global. The ‘local’ is where the ‘global’ is enacted and empowered – the ‘global’ is not produced somewhere else (Massey 2004, 11). Space is taken to be an analytical category to capture the ‘immaterial location’ where meaning is made through the intersection of norms/principles, representations and practices (Grenfell 2020, 462; Wallis 2020, 479–480). Space is therefore constituted politically, discursively and socially. Compared to space, place is more concrete, when specified groups of people and organizations engage with space in a fixed material site through interpretation, narration, perception, feelings, understanding and imagination (Wallis 2020, 480). These acts of meaning-making ultimately create placed-based agency (George 2020, 522; Grenfell 2020, 462; Wallis 2020, 480) that functions within a particular historical/temporal context. For Massey (2005) place is therefore an integration of space and time – a historical and spatial interface. We draw on Lefebvre’s (1991) and Soja’s (1989) three spatial categories, namely representations of space, spatial practices and representational spaces, but take the third spatial category of representational space to be closer to our understanding of ‘place’.

A focus on the first spatial analytical category of discursive/representational space is valuable as the gendered nature of space becomes evident through discourse, i.e. through the symbolic meaning of spaces (Massey in Wrede 2015, 13), fed by certain normative and political principles. Spaces are not only gendered in themselves, but also reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood. It follows that if we challenge conceptualizations of space, it might invariably lead to changes in gender relations (Massey 1994, 2). Representations of space help us to see how spatial discourses become hegemonic through imposing order upon space by controlling the (ideological) script (whose knowledge counts), and by ‘othering’ certain identity groups. Discursive ordering and othering mechanisms concern how difference is perceived and compartmentalized. Ordering tools seek certainty and predictability and therefore construct binaries that are deemed fixed and hierarchical, thereby entrenching dominant narratives (Brown 2020, 424–426). Once established, hegemonic discourses tend to legitimize the adoption of instrumentalist approaches. While technical approaches are not intrinsically bad, they become problematic when they close off other ways of knowing (Brown 2020, 427).

Lewis and Wigen (1997, 11) use the term ‘metageography’ to describe what happens when a singular ‘totalising spatial framework’ based on ideological ideational-space constructions entrenches hegemonic discourses about certain geographies and their people. When major powers and international organizations pursue an expansionist liberal peace agenda to rescue poor women from war, the politics of space materializes as hegemonic discourses that entrench Africa’s and women’s marginalization at the same time. By systematically privileging ‘ways of knowing, being and acting’ (Nayak and Suchland 2006, 470) of those who control the WPS script, dominant WPS discourses become entrenched.

Projecting socio-political issues onto a physical/geographical space (Quayson 2020, 970) finds expression in gendered terms through the concept of the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2010). Lugones argues that gender, just like race, was a deliberate historical colonial/modern construct imposed to control the bodies and subjectivities of the ‘Other’. This colonial gender system subordinated white women but dehumanized indigenous people (men and women) (Mendoza 2016, 18) and continues to shape the metageographical spatial imprints of liberal peacebuilding initiatives. Consequently, feminist critics (e.g. Haastrup and Hagen 2020) have pointed out the coloniality and racialized nature of current global WPS thinking about the local. Space is therefore central to the (re)production of ‘hierarchies, and the political nature of discursive practices that work to define and situate the “local” relative to other spaces’ (Chilmeran 2022, 748).

In post-conflict/peacebuilding contexts, a range of practices emerge as manifestations of a complex blend of socially produced national and local metageographies or discourses, with global WPS discourses superimposed across these scales. In the second category of space as practice, spatial practices refer to the perceived material elements of space that one can observe – the space where gendered everyday life practices play out and where local WPS politics of space is actioned. WPS spatial practices refer to ‘the agents and activities through which spaces are created, transformed, or dissolved’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022, 661). For instance, networks of actors across scales (e.g. UN Women and national/local women elites) come together to draft NAPs which then become blueprints for WPS implementation/localization. Such WPS practices produce ‘social realities so that there “are ways of doing things” … and consolidate … spaces through repetitive and patterned actions’ (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2022, 662).

It becomes the spaces where divergent norms, knowledge and power assemblages/clusters ‘meet’ in unequal measure and from where a hybrid identity position is then constructed, and from where new meanings are generated or existing meanings entrenched. We are careful not to frame hybridity as another spatial category, but rather as a particular positionality that informs spatial understandings – it can open or close off spaces. It also emerges on a continuum of intentionality, with some hybrid encounters being more deliberately orchestrated with an end goal in mind (e.g. instrumentalism associated with the NAP creation process), whereas other ‘contact zones’ are more organic and less prescriptive in nature, such as when hybridity is seen as the product of everyday practices (Allen and Dinnen 2017, 503; George and Kent 2017, 523; Peterson 2012, 11, 19).

In a post-conflict context, liberal interveners and ‘the indigenous contest, cooperate and coalesce’ (Mac Ginty 2010, 406) to produce a ‘fusion peace’ (397). But critical scholars have questioned the transformative potential of hybrid peacebuilding approaches because of their reliance on essentialized and homogenized categories comprising the ‘local-liberal’ hybrid peace, described as a ‘crude spatial ontology’ (Brigg and George 412; Allen and Dinnen 2017, 500, 504) which we argue, also lacks a nuanced gender spatial lens and remains stuck in a binary framing. At the heart of the politics of scale, space and place lies the issue of the ambiguous and contested representation of the ‘local’. The local scale is often associated with context, the traditional/indigeneity or ‘a romanticized site of indigenous peacebuilding’ (Chilmeran 2022, 749) suggesting therefore that the local is a feminized place (George 2020, 523; Massey 2004, 10) – a space where women, the poor, local cultures and labour are lumped together. ‘The global’ is often perceived as a gender-neutral space but in fact re-inscribes women’s perceived victimhood with their dependency on external (global) actors (Chilmeran 2022, 749).

Moreover, the lack of attention to power relations when describing what happens through hybridization at the local level (Forsyth 2017, 484) is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, the asymmetrical power of the constituent actors may cause friction across and within scales when views on what counts as gender norms differ (Madsen 2018, 73) and could not only create new binaries but also lead to unpredictable and messy dynamics (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013, 294–295). Secondly, hybrid positionalities within the local practice space hide ‘gendered geometries of power’, exacerbated during conflict. Women have limited access to peacebuilding interventions and often must work through local elites (Brigg and George 2020, 411). WPS spatial analyses therefore need to reckon with how local gender relations and norms shape and are shaped by hybrid arrangements (Forsyth et al. 2017, 416).

The outcomes of frictional encounters span over a complex spectrum of ‘compliance, adoption, adaption, co-option, resistance and rejection’ (Björkdahl and Höglund 2013, 297) producing different balances of global gender norms, local gender practices and types of spatially produced agency. At national level, these women’s organizations may serve as localizing agents of global gender norms, when women elites appeal to global scale policy mechanisms such as UNSCR 1325 to legitimize their national demands for policy reform and to challenge patriarchal pushback. At the same time women may engage in decolonizing practices when they adapt the WPS agenda to fit or legitimize their own existing agenda of attracting more donor funding and adding prestige to their activities (Madsen 2018, 70, 71, 77).

As a spatial practice non-elite women also engage in rescaling or ‘scaling down’ (George 2020, 519–520) by harnessing the social capital and agency that they enjoy at the local scale in terms of culture, tradition and networks. These women draw their power from their identities which are tied to certain cultural conceptualizations, which in turn shape their perspective of security. In this way they reimagine local space as a gendered site of power and leverage this power to achieve political reform at the national scale, through yoking ‘the protection of feminist goals to broader efforts to maintain the distinct political or ethnic identity of their community’ (George 2017, 60). These different local strategies underscore the value of a gender spatial lens to bring women’s diverse forms of power across scales to the surface.

The risk, however, is to regard these material expressions of local agency as the key to emancipation of the local. Allowing indigenous voices to speak does not fundamentally alter the hierarchy, because spatially indigeneity is framed ‘as exogenous to liberal geo-political societies’, with resistance framed as linked to culture ‘out there’ in the territory of the local (FitzGerald 2023, 8–9). This kind of instrumentalization negates the agency of the local as a global actor and delinks indigenous practices from their ontological and epistemological context where meaning and security is made. It therefore necessitates a deep engagement with the gendered, racialized and colonial contours shaping these societies (FitzGerald 2023, 3, 5, 13).

This brings us to the third spatial category, namely ‘place-space’, which is the obverse of instrumentalist hybrid approaches and coheres around thinking space relationally while grounding the local spatially in a specific place (i.e. emplacement, see Brigg 2020). A relational ontology emphasizes relationships rather than the actors, who are not fixed entities but are constituted through relations (Forsyth et al. 2017, 415). Relationality is concerned about the nature and quality of relations, the historical and political situatedness across time and space, as well as the effects of connectedness (Brown 2020, 434). The implication of privileging relations is that it necessitates a fundamental rethink of personhood through the lens of dependence. This expansive feature of a relational framework also means that local actors’ connections straddle spatial [and scalar] dimensions (Wallis and Richmond 2017, 430). At the same time, a relational approach also requires a groundedness in a specific place (Brigg 2020, 539, 540), which is more than a plea to take context seriously. We conceptualize this representational place-space as concrete and granular, hybrid and agentic spaces of security where agency grows from situated knowledge, rooted in lived experiences of the everyday. For Massey ‘to live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the place one is in’ (Massey 2004, 7).

The local framed as relational and grounded should not be reified. So-called customary places are not pure and static, but already imbricated with the global to make up a hybrid place-space. Massey (2004, 8) reminds us that the global is also grounded and that local place is not the opposite or a victim of global space. Care is not only a private matter practiced at the family or local community scale but also a global political issue that is central to the survival and security of people. How states ‘care for’ their citizens through decisions about the distribution of resources has a direct impact on human security (Robinson 2011, 3). The local place is agentic ‘in and of the global’ (Massey 2004, 11). ‘Place-space’ as a positive hybrid space for peace (Wallis and Richmond 2017, 426) therefore may offer an opening to alter the global from within and not from ‘out there’ as is commonly assumed. The localization of the global WPS agenda via NAPs should therefore be seen as one process running alongside the globalization of the local through mainstreaming relationality and grounded normativities at the global scale.

‘Doing’ both localization and globalization implies that WPS initiatives must be situated at once within broader global patterns of heteronormativity and militarism – challenging its coloniality, while also learning to respectfully relate to the lived and embodied realities of indigenous people in very specific places (Brigg and George 2020, 415–416; FitzGerald 2023). The art of imbricating locally emplaced knowledge with national and global knowledges suggests the mediation of difference across interconnected scales through dialogue rather than trying to eradicate alterity (Wallis and Richmond 2017, 436).

These characteristics of space serve as an overarching framework for our conceptualization of the different overlapping WPS spaces and their politics in Uganda. Two themes – localization from above and localization from below – are discussed next.

Localization from above: Instrumentalizing WPS discourses and practices in Uganda

Here we argue that the instrumentalization of WPS discourses and practices works hand in glove with a spatial strategy of top-down processes ‘localizing the global’. This implies putting ‘the local’ (including local women) last to achieve other ends and thereby preserving hierarchical and binary orders of putting ‘the global’, men and masculinities first.

We analyse the discursive representations of the local in the third Ugandan NAP (Republic of Uganda 2021) and two selected Local Action Plans (LAPs) from Kitgum and Yumbe districts from the Northern conflict-affected parts of Uganda (Kitgum District Local Government 2021; Yumbe District Local Government 2021), as well as hybrid WPS practice spaces related to these. According to the UN, a NAP is ‘a document that details the actions that the government is currently taking, and those initiatives that it will undertake within a given timeframe, in order to meet the obligations set out in all the WPS resolutions’ (Popovic, Lyytikainen, and Barr 2010, xv). LAPs outline the actions that are taken at district level to achieve similar goals. Firstly, we turn to the NAPs. They are viewed as the primary means by which countries articulate at the national scale how they intend to operationalize and localize the WPS agenda (Haastrup and Hagen 2020, 146). NAPs are reflecting a ‘cartography of power’ and our readings of the plan uncover the discursive framings of the gendered and local spatial arrangements, and when mentioned, whether they are placed at the centre or the margins.

The Ugandan NAP and its discursive metageographical framings of the local

The strengthening of systems and structures for the implementation and coordination of the NAP is one of four priority outcomes of the Ugandan NAP. The NAP states that ‘the localisation process was introduced by CSOs [Civil Society Organisations] in partnership with the MGLSD [Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development]’ (Republic of Uganda 2021, 31) aiming to engage a variety of different actors. Localization should facilitate ‘greater cross-sectoral co-operation and collaboration’, ‘systematic coordination between national and local level’ as well as ‘local ownership’ (31). In this way, localizing merely serves to identify the local as a site for top-down policymaking and as a means to an end with a focus on policy language. Within this way of localizing, the ‘local’ and localization is not seen as the source of transformative practices and processes on WPS.

The discourses on the role of local women draw on familiar spatial scripts on (more) participation of women to achieve specific ends – a form of instrumentalization of women’s participation as part of strategies of localization. Local women should be part of, e.g. elections, management committees and transitional justice processes, which should promote peace and security based on the stereotypical assumption that women are peaceful actors. Meanwhile research illustrates how the participation of women in politics serves to preserve the power of the current semi-authoritarian regime through the reserved seats system, attacks on women in opposition or co-optation of opposition candidates (Tripp 2023, 159–161). A variation of this discourse on participation of local women relies on women as informants in relation to early warning for electoral processes, for climate-related natural disasters and viral diseases (e.g. COVID and Ebola) as well as detecting and reporting on violent extremism. Thus, women are perceived as advisers in these areas with specific capacities for reaching out and subtle ways of exercising power through persuading – thus a paternalistic metageography.

At the same time, local women are seen as needing capacity building. To pave the way for this, a series of face-to-face engagements are planned with religious and cultural leaders on women’s role in peace and security, leadership and management (Republic of Uganda 2021, 23). Generally, the roles of religious and cultural leaders in the NAP are limited to being recipients of ‘sensitisation’ (21), a target group for a manual on women’s human rights (23), as well as messengers in the NAP communication strategy on the importance of women’s role in peace and security (59). As part of localization, the NAP should be popularized at both national and local level (including for religious and cultural leaders) – a task mainly assigned to women’s organizations (33). In the NAP, the national gender machinery and the local level (including women’s organizations) are expected to bear the brunt of the work and are at the receiving end of the NAP.

The discursive representations of ‘the global’ confirm hegemonic and powerful sub-texts. In the acknowledgements, gratitude is extended to both UN Women and Norway for their ‘direct [financial] support in the process’ (Republic of Uganda 2021, 3). Two representatives from UN Women were recruited to be part of the NAP development process labelled as inclusive and participatory. Furthermore, a Theory of Change for the NAP has been elaborated as part of the donor development talk. In the map of the structure for NAP coordination, the Gender Development Partners Working Group is placed at a high level close to the National Steering Committee, whereas women’s organizations are placed in the National Technical Committee and as Implementing Partners except for two national women’s organizations (Coalition for Action on 1325 and Women’s International Peace Center) (34–35). Furthermore, the logos of UN Women and Norway are made visible in the launching of the plan.¹ This preserves existing power structures between the Global North and South maintaining the whiteness of NAP development at a high level and the inherent coloniality of gender. In a policy dialogue,² a UN Women representative stated that ‘localisation has huge power’ but also that dealing with NAPs is a ‘core business for UN Women’, mentioning that ‘NAPness’ can be exported through processes of ‘cut and paste’, which do not consider the differences of conflicts across geographical spaces. NAPness indicates that ‘doing NAPs’ has become a WPS package with specific buzzwords and tools as an end in itself.

Fundamentally, the state-centric focus of the NAP masks the record of state-led violence in the form of, for example, forcing local people into camps in the Northern part of Uganda with very limited protection as well as the current targeting of LGBTQ + persons (Parashar 2019).

Extending global discourses through Ugandan local action plans and donor projects

One way of localization is to develop LAPs which could either be directed towards the objectives in the NAP to make up for shortcomings in its implementation or addressing locally based insecurities and pathways towards inclusive peace and security which may or may not be in line with the NAP (Jones 2020). In Uganda, the Kampala-based Coalition for Action on 1325 runs a programme on ‘Localization of the Implementation of the WPS Agenda’ also funded by Norway and UN Women³ and according to their homepage⁴ seven LAPs have been developed, including for Kitgum and Yumbe districts. The LAPs for these two districts are examples of the first type of LAP as it states that the Yumbe LAP should ‘domesticate’ the NAP and tailor it to the conflicts in the districts (Yumbe District Local Government 2021, i) and that the Kitgum LAP ‘localizes the NAP’ (Kitgum District Local Government 2021, i) subsuming LAPs in relation to the NAP as an extension of the instrumentalization.

Despite the emphasis on local situatedness, the processes of developing the LAPs follow a ‘one-size-fits-it all’ model with replicable ‘best practices’ cross-learning events from other districts and WPS capacity-building somewhat sidelining attention to local power dynamics in conflict. The LAPs do not state whether these districts were selected by local actors, such as Kitgum Women’s Peace Initiative (KIWEPI) or the Coalition for Action on 1325, but the Yumbe LAP states that ‘participants were convinced and agreed to have a LAP’ (2) after being introduced to localization as a strategy indicating that not everyone in Yumbe agreed.

The contextual analysis of the LAPs points towards complex multifaceted local conflicts affecting women’s livelihood including safe access to resources such as land, water and firewood, as well as election-related violence within families. Furthermore, the Yumbe LAP states that the area has the highest number of refugees from South Sudan in Uganda, accentuating the struggle for resources in Yumbe. In Kitgum, emphasis is also on access to land and gender-based violence, while pointing towards the effects of the armed conflict in the area and LRA presence. These are, for example, low levels of education for the youth and abuse of alcohol and drugs after being in camps spatially separated from family. In contrast to the NAP, the contextual analysis provides more nuanced insights into the grounded realities of material needs and power struggles among different groups of women. Yet, the all-inclusive language in the LAPs glosses over these power struggles hindering an intersectional analysis, with no mentioning of the representations of, e.g. refugee women and young women (among others) in these processes. Furthermore, the LAPs point towards abstract solutions like (more) knowledge in the form of ‘capacity-building’, ‘sensitization’ and ‘training’ downplaying existing local knowledge and labelling ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ as barriers rather than seeing them as integrated parts of local communities. This is reflected in the Yumbe LAP by, for example, activities to do trainings on gender laws and policies for cultural and religious leaders to ‘[t]ransform them into advocates for the promotion and protection of women and girls in their communities’ (Yumbe District Local Government 2021, 16). Similarly, in the Kitgum LAP activities like dialogues with cultural and religious leaders on ‘[n]egative social norms and practices that hinder women participation in development’ (Kitgum District Local Government 2021, 24) are mentioned as solutions. Curtis, Ebila, and Martin de Almagro’s (2022) examination of the memoirs of three Ugandan women ex-combatants also shows that despite some hints of transformative knowledge production, the metageographical politics of representation remains. The memoirs are ‘the products of transnational mediated processes whereby the interests of power (expressed through international organizations …)’ (404) flatten complex personalized narratives to become representations of the experiences of a homogenous group of ‘African women-in-conflict’ (406). Such discursive strategies of ordering and othering resonate with the critique against uncritical hybrid peacebuilding practices – closing off space for a greater diversity of experiences.

Top-down processes and related instrumentalization are also reflected in donor-driven projects on implementation of the NAP and LAPs where national and local Ugandan women elites act as localizing agents of global gender norms. Initiation of activities comes mostly from ‘above’, not from the districts. It is the ‘Project’ (shorthand for funding) that brings people together, not the other way round. The banner of the ‘Project’ hides power differentials and the fact that women in those districts must work through other local women closer to the centres of power. One such project (‘Women at the Centre of Sustaining Peace in Uganda’) coordinated by the Women’s International Peace Centre and the Uganda Women’s Network (UWONET) and supported by The Embassy of Ireland, assists the implementation of the NAP nationally but also in Karamoja, mainly in Kotido and Moroto districts. The project design follows a familiar script of raising awareness to address the low uptake of the NAP. The project is led by 20 national women peace champions and 100 district women peace mediators in Karamoja who will partner with a variety of government stakeholders (Women’s International Peace Centre n.d.). Similarly, the USAID Securing Peace and Promoting Prosperity (EKISIL) project in Karamoja seeks to promote both the US and Ugandan WPS NAPs (Guti 2022) but is couched in the liberal language of ‘meaningful participation’ of women in public decision-making structures and frames local Women Peace Forums in Karamoja as one of the vehicles of such localization of peace and security. Such spatial top-down processes and instrumentalist WPS discourses and practices do not allow room for seeing the local as an equal in the global WPS space. ‘Local’ women are confined to spaces at the margins far away from the centre of decision making as ‘localizing’ actors or ‘average third world women’ (Mohanty 1988).

Localization from below: WPS micropolitics and practices as sites for transformation

This form of localization is a more organic construction of everyday micropolitics, gendered security and cultural politics that engages in pushback and places the ‘local’ first. It can be characterized as ‘globalizing the local’ for example through rescaling (George 2017; 2020). Our guiding consideration is, to what extent do the different spatial strategies open up space for seeing the local as an equal in the global WPS space rather than conflating and homogenizing women, civil society and the local to create a feminized space that is delinked from formal politics?

We firstly analyse examples of hybrid, contested and socially produced WPS practices attached to local material space – in particular how changing gender relations during and after the war in Northern Uganda contributed to women’s agency, while also recognizing the transformational limits of these agentic practices. In the second part, we examine what positive representational hybrid spaces could look like when indigenous relational values and practices, such as the African notion of Ubuntu, are taken seriously.

Women’s variegated expressions of agency in the Acholi and Karamoja subregions

Although Uganda witnessed armed conflicts across the Western, Eastern, and Central regions over many years, we situate our examples within the Karamojong and Acholi pastoral communities in North-eastern and Northern Uganda respectively. The Karamojong have a complex history of cattle raiding and cycles of violence fuelled by issues of livelihood and masculinity (Stites 2013, 136, 145), exacerbated by subregional conflict. Between 1987 and 2006, the Acholi subregion became the epicentre of the protracted war between the Ugandan government forces and the LRA, through displacement and child soldier enlistments (Chigudu 2016, 27–28; Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 173–174; Messerschmidt and Quest 2020, 88–90). Although the war is officially over, post-conflict gendered insecurities and trauma persist because of war-related sexual violence and child marriage.

As a result of the war in Northern Uganda, women’s care roles expanded, having to look after orphaned children, grandchildren and other members of the extended family, carrying the full burden of household survival (Chigudu 2016, 28; Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 167). These expanded roles were exercised alongside existing feminine roles of women in peacebuilding at clan level who prepared food and sang and danced at gatherings, while some elderly women were allowed to provide words of wisdom on dispute resolution or bless ‘returnees’ (Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 176). In material terms, it meant an increase in women’s sphere of influence in the clan (183). Yet, women’s exercise of resilience and agency had to deal with the additional burden of increased domestic violence after the war. In the refugee camps in Northern Uganda most civilian men lost their income opportunity due to displacement (Messerschmidt and Quest 2020, 91). Chigudu (2016, 28) observes that in these camps a degeneration of social values occurred due to the disintegration of the Acholi family structure. Men became idle (Stites 2013, 139), and with rising alcoholism and drug abuse domestic violence increased. Whereas the home and family spaces became feminized sites of authority during war, these spaces became sites of violence when men who returned after war were no longer breadwinners and protectors of the family.

Women also expressed their new-found agency after the war through service provision initiatives to meet the basic survival needs of vulnerable communities. In Northern Uganda small group saving schemes, among others, were set up to assist women whose livelihoods through crop production was disrupted by the war (Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 174). What started as the informal collection of food from friends and family later developed into small businesses and the formation of savings or microfinance/microcredit schemes. Such practices evolved beyond mere survivalist interventions (186) to become more institutionalized. Consequently, women acquired new social positions that allowed them to challenge patriarchal constructs of femininity (185), but only to a limited extent. KIWEPI and the Women’s Peace Initiative-Uganda (WOPI-U), for instance, implemented a men-only project that celebrated men who performed ‘peaceful’ masculinities (i.e. no alcohol abuse, no domestic violence, assisting with household chores, etc.) but this inadvertently reinforced dominant masculinities (189–191).

However, there are also examples of more transformative/subversive attempts by women peace activists, such as Chigudu’s (2016) account of how Isis Women’s International Cross-Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE) in Northern Uganda have adapted feminist/WPS agenda within the local space. Their vision for peace entailed a holistic approach to ‘address the body, mind and spirit that has been shattered’ (25), consisting of a practical (tactical) intervention to address women’s material needs after the war coupled with longer-term strategic efforts to elevate the socio-cultural status of women in relation to men at community level (24). The reality is that the practical approach could easily overshadow the more long-term strategy. Isis-WICCE therefore sought to overcome the tension by emphasizing that the embodied experiences of women in war and peace find expression in the social, namely the social relations of a particular community (30). In the face of the widespread socio-cultural dislocation among the Acholi after the war, Isis-WICCE narratives called for bringing back traditional values, blaming the war for the loss of ‘culture’ and telling government and development agencies that they have their ‘own traditional way of doing things’ (30). Notions of gender equity are therefore creatively reinterpreted in the context of culturally relevant norms. This bold (re)assertion of female responsibility for socio-cultural restoration thus allows for a much clearer local voice, without reifying this role as feminized.

The glue that ties the examples of women’s activities in the WPS space together is that their agency lies in their capacity to engage in collective (political) action. A spatial focus on WPS in Uganda thus reveals how gender norms ‘work’ in hybridized spaces, through compliance and conformity, subtle resistance and diversion, but also resistance through punitive practices and state violence.

Towards relational place-spaces of care and community

The practice arrangements referred to above do not go far enough and do not subvert binaries between universal liberal peacebuilding and indigenous approaches. There is therefore a need to consider alternative approaches. Our framing of a representational place-space that is relational at its core makes two points: Firstly, to decolonize global WPS spatial knowledge it needs to be grounded and embedded in a specific place, where indigenous principles of connectedness form part of everyday security practices. Thus, the point of departure is to ‘acknowledge normatively and practically that people do [global politics, including WPS] on a daily basis, that their lives are affected by [the global], and that they matter and can affect world politics in turn’ (Hudson 2016, 52). Secondly, the mutual imbrication and constitution of the local and the global means that the potential of the local to operate across geographical scales to help transform global binary thinking should be taken seriously. To illustrate these points, we draw on indigenous peacebuilding approaches among the Acholi as well as other initiatives by Ugandan women specifically to ensure human security.

Reconciliation/forgiveness rituals were executed by traditional leaders, chiefs, elders and clan leaders under the umbrella of Ker Kal Kwaro and the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. Mato oput rituals helped to re-establish relations with reconciliation and compensation initiated by the perpetrators (e.g. former LRA combatants) and their clan towards the victims and their clan after the war. The ritual of nyono tong gweno welcomed and cleansed returnees, lwoko pig wang washed away the tears and moyo piny involved the burial of bones to appease the dead (Messerschmidt and Quest 2020, 90; Omach 2016, 89).

Underlying these practices are the principles of relational personhood embedded within the African notion of Ubuntu. A variant of this in the Ugandan context is known as Umuntu, but we will draw on Ubuntu as the more well-known philosophy of ‘I am because you are’ (Tamale 2020, 222). Ubuntu emphasizes relatedness, interdependence, responsibility and solidarity, seeing the individual woman or man as part of the collective in line with afro-communitarianism. It values norms such as ‘cooperation and working together’ (Mupedziswa, Rankopo, and Mwansa 2019, 22) and ‘Unity in Diversity’ (Tamale 2020, 223–224). Ubuntu also relates to a feminist ethics of care and a human everyday-centred approach to global politics as it is linked to a moral obligation to care for one another. Human beings should display the values of generosity, hospitality and friendliness as principles for living together in close-knit communities.

However, since the local is never pure and should not be reified, the sharp edges of Ubuntu must be acknowledged, especially in patriarchal post-war contexts such as Uganda. Ubuntu is a double-edged sword as women are often denied the compassion and mutual respect as they are the ones responsible for the ‘caring’ and may be excluded from peace fora and suffer from violence. Similarly, the approach assumes that women are related to men though marriage. This excludes single women (though they may have rights as daughters and sisters), childless women (motherhood is highly valued) and other genders such as homosexuals (Manyonganise 2015). That said, we contend that if taken seriously, the principles of relationality and compassion ‘can be strategically deployed to operationalize gender justice, albeit after a careful interrogation and historicization of the concept itself’ (Tamale 2020, 229). Ubuntu can have transformative potential if it is linked to African feminisms, as the focus within African feminism is on ‘inclusion, co-operation and accommodation’ (Nkealah 2016, 63). Furthermore, African feminism is a counter-reaction against hegemonic Western thinking as it addresses ‘an African cultural perspective, an African geo-political location and an African ideological viewpoint’ (63). One form of African feminism is nego-feminism relating to ‘no ego’ emphasizing relatedness to the collective, as well as negotiation and a give-and-take approach (Nnaemeka 2004, 377).

What we therefore see when we turn to granular grassroots examples by women in Uganda after the conflict (Bataka groups and LAPEWA), is a needs-based survivalist response informed by an Ubuntu-inspired African feminism. The examples will illustrate that women’s security work is not purely about service provision, but rather about fostering social relations through material and immaterial forms of support. The need to maintain social relations served as a safety net in the absence of social services in pre-colonial times as well as in times of conflict. An Ubuntu-feminist reading therefore creates a different picture compared to the limited agency described in the previous section. When the indigenous ‘difference’ of a particular place-space is taken seriously, what may seem like regular socio-economic interventions take on a new meaning.

The Bataka groups in Western Uganda are burial societies formed by community members to provide effective responses towards loss and death emphasizing ‘Bataka Twimukey’ (‘local people rise up’). The need for these is related to widespread poverty and psychological aspects such as ‘low self-esteem, loss of control, anger, and insecurity’ (Twesigye et al. 2019, 146) and the attribution of death to human malevolence. The need for the burial societies relates to difficulties of community members to perform their social obligations and arrange a proper funeral for their deceased family members. The difficulties are related to poverty within families, the AIDS pandemic and the use of local technology (stretchers for transport of the body) (148). The support from the burial societies could be practical like providing wood for preparing food for mourners, the buying of a coffin and ensuring transport of the deceased to ensure that s/he was buried on the correct place/land. Furthermore, the Bataka groups provided psychological support in the form of counselling for the family and support for development activities (151). These activities took place in gender-segregated spheres as women often provided the counselling for fellow women, whereas men could relate to the men left behind. In the spirit of Ubuntu, the Bataka groups are based on a holistic approach relating to material and immaterial needs both on a short and long-term basis. They meet the economic needs for funerals, provide loans for development activities, and ensure that community members with the caring of the groups manage to cope with a changing life situation as a part of the collective.

LAPEWA refers to a women’s group in two communities, Laroo and Pece, in Northern Uganda, but started as a group for widows in Gulu district in 1997. The practice of informal foster care relates to the conflict in the area (1986–2006) with children in armed conflict, living in settings where they are recovering from trauma or have been separated from their families for a long period. Mostly boys have been forced to be directly part of the armed conflict, whereas mostly girls have suffered from sexual violence (Luwangula, Twikirize, and Twesigye 2019, 162–163). However, the community is seen as the best setting for these children to recover and this informal practice relies on the spirit of Ubuntu through hospitality of opening the doors for a child even though the child is not related though kinship. However, the care arrangement remained gendered, albeit that women have been replacing men as the providers and protectors of the family. Ironically, women’s maternal role was thus extended amidst huge scarcity of resources (Clarke and O’Brien 2019, 184). The practice of informal foster care started as a crisis response with young children in the streets committing crimes who as a result were potentially facing death due to retaliation (167). However, it later became more proactive with attempts to identify children at risk and use of methods such as drama performances.

Although these everyday examples in place-spaces are ambiguous as they are (mainly) based on an extension of women’s care responsibilities (depending on women to be the local champions of peace and security), they nevertheless show how these practices originate largely from within local traditions. As such in their original forms they represent genuine bottom-up localization efforts and openings for transformation towards peace and security from the margins – albeit small-scale transformative steps and the centre for changes in discursive representations and practice spaces. This implies the forming of new holistic and interconnected spatial configurations guiding peacebuilding. Care is not just a local or community matter, but of global significance for ensuring gender-just peace.

Conclusion

To answer our first question, namely what the theorization of WPS spatial politics might look like empirically in a post-conflict African setting, we set out to foreground space as an analytical category and problematized the way in which localization of the WPS agenda is framed and practiced with reference to Uganda. Through an understanding of space as political, dynamic and relational and drawing on spatial typologies related to global hegemonic discursive representations, everyday hybrid (global-local) material practices, and representational local indigenous embeddedness we sought to remap the spatial politics between the Global North and the Global South.

Our analysis of the discourses in the Ugandan NAP and selected LAPs together with related WPS projects and practices revealed that they all bear the markings of a spatial arrangement where the global dominates. The perceived benevolence of these undertakings masks the gendered and racialized power differential captured in global-local dichotomous constructions and therefore makes it hard to challenge the instrumentalist way in which elites operationalize these plans. Localization from above therefore fails to support a more equitable WPS spatial politics. Our research also showed that local actors are not powerless. While national elites gain agency through acting as extenders of global WPS discourses, non-elite women engage in a broad range of localization activities from below. Some of their longer-term strategies to protect local cultures and practices offer a glimpse of the local scale’s potential as a site of transformation.

However, such sporadic agentic expressions do little to dislodge the local from its perceived status as a space ‘out there’ or at the bottom of the scale, where global WPS principles are applied but not generated, and therefore of little significance to the way in which global WPS politics is conducted. To challenge this, we emphasized firstly the feminist notion that global politics is already part of the everyday and grounded in the place-space of community, care and connectedness. Secondly, we contended that the local must be part of the global as well. It means that Ubuntu values and practices should apply across all scales to foster a positive hybrid peace.

This brings us to the second question, namely what are the implications of these theoretical and empirical insights for new ways of doing WPS? In short, it requires a fundamental change in the ethos and practices of the current WPS architecture. Although it may be tempting to conceive of the indigenous as limited to the local in a geographical sense, successful localization rests on the collapsing of binaries between the local, national, international/global scales. Values of care, community and hospitality should be reflected upfront in the NAP discourses, instead of expecting communities at district/village level to ‘reinterpret’ WPS values. Instead of objectifying traditional leaders as recipients to be sensitized about WPS, a deep engagement with the relational principles of indigenous knowledge will make WPS pillars of participation, protection, prevention and recovery in the NAPs and LAPs look entirely different from the start.

A relationally embedded approach would then entail the negotiation of the regeneration of indigenous community values (where gender may not be the most important issue) alongside the gendered consequences of war and the emergent WPS priorities of the post-conflict state. We contend that this is possible if we make local place-space the starting point for peace and security. And seeing the local relationally as part of the global could offer a pathway for making grounded indigenous knowledge integral to the path towards peace before interventions and work towards developing a ‘roadmap’ for decolonizing gendered and racialized dichotomies.

When women take on new social and material roles in hostile patriarchal environments, as seen in the case of Uganda, their agency remains at risk of being subverted by structural forces. At the same time gender work in the Global South will continue with or without WPS scripts and packages. For WPS to be impactful in this complex hybrid environment will therefore require a careful and imaginative calibration across scales.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

* This work was supported by the Nordic Africa Institute.

Notes on contributors

Heidi Hudson

Heidi Hudson holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of the Free State, South Africa. She is currently a professor in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, specializing in feminist security studies, and gender and peacebuilding in Africa in particular. Her other research interests include the African knowledge project and decoloniality.

Diana Højlund Madsen

Diana Højlund Madsen holds a PhD on gender mainstreaming processes in Ghana from Roskilde University, Denmark. She is a senior researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden and a research fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa. She specializes in gender, peace and security as well as gender and political citizenship and empowerment. She has a research project entitled ‘Making politics safer – gendered violence and electoral temporalities in Africa’. Her other research interests include African feminisms.

Notes

1 https://africa.unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/stories/2021/09/uganda-flags-off-implementation-of-nap-iii-on-unscr-1325.

2 Policy dialogue ‘Fifteen Diplomats on a Power Keg: Africa and the United Nations Security Council’ organized by University of Pretoria and the Nordic Africa Institute, 24 January 2023, www.nai.se.

3 The actual implementation of the LAPs is dependent on funding from either the district where four out of seven will provide 1% of their budget or external donors like Norway and UN Women.

4 https://www.coact1325.org/local-action-plans/ accessed on 28 August 2023.