Abstract
For over a decade, a complex and layered ‘global justice assemblage’ of local, national, and international political and institutional actors have cooperated or contended with each other on the pressing questions of how to define and how to bring justice to the northern Ugandan conflict. This assemblage consists of representatives
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of domestic and international criminal courts, (donor) governments, lawyers, local and international NGOs, UN, EU and AU agencies, military commands, and local peace activists. They have each, in collaboration or contestation, upheld a particular ‘frame’ of the protracted civil war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda; cast blame and accountability in specific ways, and justified divergent institutional responses. It is for the purpose of describing, explaining, and understanding the actors, interests, and voices within this ‘global justice assemblage’ as pertains to the case of Uganda that the four articles that comprise this dissertation, although distinct in the topics that each one addresses, are nevertheless bound together into a coherent whole. Transcending a local-global divide, the four articles that form the body of this dissertation lend insight into how the above-described assembly of actors became involved in ‘governing’ the conflict in northern Uganda. By drawing on a critical discursive approach to violent conflict, this dissertation empirically examines the discursive and institutional alliances, shifts and effects that have characterized this assembly’s governing trajectory between 2005 and 2015. Four main questions guided the research: 1. What discourses have been produced and distributed regarding the northern Uganda conflict? 2. Which of these discourses have been translated into judicial and military practices? 3. How are these judicial and military practices playing out locally? 4. How and why are particular signifying discourses and regulatory practices politically functional? To answer these questions I made use of an interpretive epistemology and an embedded case study design that investigates a contemporary phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context. I conducted field research in both Uganda, as well as closer to home, such as in The Hague and Brussels. My units of analysis in this embedded case study design were individuals, groups, institutions, and social interactions, while my sources of evidence were documents, archival records, in-depth interviews, focus groups discussions and direct observation. I took a grounded theory approach to collecting and analysing my evidence.
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