IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iob/dpaper/2003006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: the New Order no one ordered

Author

Listed:
  • Van Acker, Frank

Abstract

The conflict in Northern Uganda is now in its 17th year. It pitches a rebel group, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army, against the Ugandan government and against its own people, the Acholi. The robustness of the conflict as a semi-permanent feature of the Ugandan condition for such a long time indicates that the forces working against peace appear to be stronger than the forces working for it. To understand the conflict, the complex genesis of the Northern war must be understood. It must be adequately explained why the insurgency occurred at all, why it did not occur at an earlier time and why it persists to this day. These conditions, once clarified, must be complimented by an analysis of the character of the LRA rebellion itself, often oversimplified and described in terms of its assumed millenarian character (with reference to the biblical Ten Commandments). The following analysis will first establish a brief historical perspective to the conflict in the North. It will then analyze the emergence of the conflict in terms of root causes and situational factors, and look at the question why the LRA rebellion adopted the format it did and why the war persists for all these years. It will finally look at the question of what next.

Suggested Citation

  • Van Acker, Frank, 2003. "Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: the New Order no one ordered," IOB Discussion Papers 2003.06, Universiteit Antwerpen, Institute of Development Policy (IOB).
  • Handle: RePEc:iob:dpaper:2003006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/oldcontent/container2143/files/Publications/DP/2003/06-vanacker.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iob:dpaper:2003006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hans De Backer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iobuabe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.