Erin Baines

• ubc

In this article, we consider the memory practices of families whose loved ones were forcibly disappeared during periods of political violence. The families of the disappeared live with an ambiguous loss, often in highly insecure contexts and state denial. Families maintain memory practices to keep loved ones present with them, refuse dehumanizing v...

Fatuma has been an intimate part of, and observed, the everyday lives and ongoing advocacy of the Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) since it began under a mango tree next to her family home as a child. The Network was founded to advocate for reparations and justice for women in post-conflict northern Uganda, in particular for the thousands of girls an...

Breaking the silence around wartime sexual violence is often understood as paramount to ending it. Many survivors feel compelled to publicly testify to prevent future harms, contest denial, and hold perpetrators to account. Yet, testimony is not always spoken, and silence should not be elided with powerlessness. In this article, we conceptualize th...

In the strain of remaking the social world after a violent conflict, women who conceive children as the result of sexual violence must often raise them amongst resentful victim communities. Abducted and forced into marriage by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, Acholi women are perceived to have returned with the children of the enemy a...

Children ‘born of war’ refer to people of any age conceived as the result of sexual violence at the hands of armed forces or groups during war, displacement, genocide or military occupation. Due to the circumstances of their birth, children ‘born of war’ can experience social stigma, discrimination and exclusion, resulting in diminished life chance...

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes will often dismantle the command-and-control structures of non-state armed groups (NSAGs) to prevent possible remobilization. Recent studies demonstrate that in some cases ex-combatant networks provide important social and economic support that hasten transitions to civilian life; howev...

During a more than twenty-year conflict in northern Uganda, the rebel group Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) abducted tens of thousands of children and youth, not only pressing them to fight and commit atrocities against a civilian population, but also marry and have children. Thousands of women have since returned with so called children ‘born of war’...

Children born as the result of conflict related sexual violence often embody painful memories of war-affected communities. As a result, children ‘born of war’ experience abuse and neglect, social isolation and a sense of never-belonging. Existing scholarship grapples with the challenges of seeking justice for children ‘born of war’ given the comple...

The Conjugal Slavery in War (CSiW) partnership has published the second policy brief of the series, Forward-Looking Strategies in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. This policy brief, titled “Masculinities + WPS,” is authored by Divija Madhani, an undergraduate UBC student and research assistant under the Conjugal Slavery in War (CSiW) partners...

During the war in northern Uganda, thousands of women abducted as girls by the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, were released and escaped to return home, many with children born as the result of “forced marriage”. Most women and children no longer have contact with their children’s father by choice, because they are dead, or their identity...

In this article, we examine exceptional circumstances in which men who father children born as the result of conflict-related sexual violence assume full or partial responsibility for their child's well-being. Children ‘born of war’ are increasingly recognized as a particular victim group in relevant international policy frameworks. Their social st...

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (adopted in 2000) seeks to protect women’s bodily integrity in war and promote women’s rights to participate in decisions affecting them in the realm of peace and security. Its normative framework offers potential to transform how peace and security is framed in the UN Security Council. At the same time, critics...

How does the process of becoming family shape a male soldier’s rendering of an imagined future in the precariousness of war? We consider this in relation to the experiences of former combatants in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), where polygamous family units were formed under capricious and coercive conditions. To govern a diverse population abdu...

This chapter discusses the social dimensions of war trauma and recovery through the examples of Mozambique, with a detailed focus on the Gorongosa, a district in the center of the country, and Uganda, specifically, Gulu district. Both countries are exemplary of how state actors and civilians struggle to come to terms with experiences of mass politi...

Rights-based approaches to forced marriage in wartime document forms of harm women experience, to the exclusion of men's experiences. Such framing problematically reiterates a binary of women/men, victim/perpetrator and consent/coercion. Arguably, this delineation is useful in supporting projects of culpability and legal redress. However, what does...

In Buried in the Heart, Erin Baines explores the political agency of women abducted as children by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, forced to marry its commanders, and to bear their children. Introducing the concept of complex victimhood, she argues that abducted women were not passive victims, but navigated complex social and politic...

Decker Alicia C.. In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014. xviii + 244 pp. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Abbreviations. Note on the Use of Names. Appendix: Methods and Sources. Notes. Maps. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $80.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0821421185. - Volume 58 Issue 3...

In this article, I am concerned with the political agency available to victims of wartime violence, and the subsequent insights it generates for thinking about complicity and responsibility. The article first considers the problematic ways in which victims are cast in the discipline of transitional justice, drawing on interdisciplinary studies of g...

The article is concerned with the relationship between the processes of return after mass displacement, and social repair. If mass displacement frays the social fabric of the family and community, possibilities of re-crafting a viable sociality are also found within these intimate relations. Thus, we look to the everyday as a space of negotiation a...

Background Reintegration programs are commonly offered to former combatants and abductees to acquire civilian status and support services to reintegrate into post-conflict society. Among a group of young female abductees in northern Uganda, this study examined access to post-abduction reintegration programming and tested for between group differenc...

One of the most vexing contradictions about the Uganda originated rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), is the fact that it institutionalized forced marriage on the one hand, while actively discouraging sexually immoral behavior on the other: rape, sexual violence, and promiscuity both within the group and outside it were punishable by sev...

This exploratory qualitative study reports on the perspectives of students belonging to campus clubs at one Canadian university who conduct advocacy activities on issues that relate to Africa. Our study focuses on a particular social action (advocacy) that takes place in a particular social site (university campus), with the aim to critically exami...

The security of civilians in contemporary conflicts continues to tragically elude humanitarians. Scholars attribute this crisis in protection to macro-structural deficiencies, such as the failure of states to comply with international conventions and norms and the inability of international institutions to successfully reduce violence by warring pa...

Mediante un intercambio entre los miembros de organizaciones comunitarias que documentan violaciones de derechos humanos en el noroeste de Colombia y en el norte de Uganda, este artículo examina estrategias de construcción de memoria en las que un individuo o un colectivo crea un espacio social seguro para dar testimonio y re-historiar hechos de vi...

Recent national and international debates on truth and reconciliation in Uganda have emphasized the importance of incorporating local-level mechanisms into a national transitional justice strategy. The Juba Peace Talks represented an opportunity to develop and articulate sufficient and just alternatives and complementary mechanisms to the internati...

Storytelling can be a process of seeking social equilibrium after violence. We examine this proposition through the stories of Ajok, an Acholi woman who was abducted by the rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda and who was forced into marriage and motherhood. We consider how her stories contest discrimination by her neigh...

1 Through an exchange between members of community-based organizations that docu-ment human rights violations in northwest Colombia and northern Uganda, this article examines multiple strategies of memory making in which an individual or a collective creates a safe social space to give testimony and re-story past events of violence or resistance. I...

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has forcibly recruited tens of thousands of youth from northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, and more presently the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. The longer that abducted youth spend inside the armed group, the more likely they will assume positions of command. These roles are differentia...

The challenges of protecting human rights after violent conflict are daunting. Often the very state institutions charged with protecting and promoting rights are the same ones that perpetrated crimes during the war, or must accommodate disarmed groups within new governance structures to move toward peace. Critical institutions to protect rights – t...

In northern Uganda, children and youth once abducted by the notorious Lord's Resistance Army now live in internally displaced persons camps, facing challenging social, economic and security conditions. Within this context, former combatants state they would prefer to rearm than face a ‘painful’ and inevitable death. Drawing on qualitative interview...

A vibrant debate in the field of transitional justice concerns the relative ability of global, national, and local mechanisms to promote justice after violent conflict. Discussion largely focuses on more formal mechanisms of justice (courts, tribunals, or truth commissions), implying that state institutions and the law are solely responsible for sh...

Since President Yoweri Museveni captured Ugandan state power in 1986 with the promise of liberating the country from the travails of its colonial past, Ugandans have simultaneously experienced peace and war, prosperity as well as economic impoverishment, and a crisis in security alongside increased protection. Explaining how and why these opposing...

Dominic Ongwen is an indicted war criminal and former child soldier in one of the world's most brutal rebel organisations, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen is at once victim and perpetrator: what justice strategy is relevant? I introduce the concept of complex political perpetrators to describe youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces in...

Through the story of a former rebel fighter, this article examines some of the justice and reconciliation challenges in northern Uganda today. While talks between the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and Government of Uganda have generated the best chance for peace in the 20-year conflict, the International Criminal Court's indictment of rebel leaders...

Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, scholars and policy think-tanks have produced an impressive number of macro-level studies and theories to explain the seemingly inexplicable: how and why did this happen? Yet these studies, most often based on ethnic and/or global level analyses, tend to simplify complex social relations at the local level which...

you are feeling sad). Appeasing a person who is sad is referred to as "kweyo cwiny", or the English equivalent of "cooling the heart". Respondents often used the latter expression to describe the process of healing and reconciliation derived from truth telling, acknowledgement and compensation, and so forms the title of the report. Cover Photo: A s...

In 2003, thousands of women and children were released during the height of a military operation and returned to Uganda. Up to 5,000 LRA are thought to still be at large in the DRC, including upwards of 3,000 women and children. In 2006, as part of a research project on justice, a team of Acholi researchers interviewed 147 mothers of children born...