Erin Baines

This dissertation centers the lived experiences of women who survived wartime sexual violence and forced marriage during a war in Northern Uganda (1986-2008) between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and Uganda’s government. In the post-conflict setting, little information exists on how women decide whether or not to continue forced marriages started in rebel captivity. More so, some fifteen years after the war ended, few feel they have realized justice in a legal sense, despite a successful prosecution of an LRA commander in the International Criminal Court. Drawing on lived experience as knowledge, this qualitative research addressed the following questions: Why do mothers decide to reunite or not with the fathers to their children born of forced marriage and sexual violence? How do women make these decisions? What is the prevailing sense of justice and reparation sought by women who had children from forced marriage? Over a seven months’ period in 2019, interviews, focus groups and storytelling were conducted with sixty-eight participants in Gulu district, northern Uganda. Most scholarly literature on wartime forced marriages and sexual violence focus on rights-based approaches to justice, limiting it to retribution for a legal wrong; yet women emphasize that justice is pluralistic and exceeds law. This interdisciplinary research develops a theory of lived justice, a holistic sense of justice that enables women, and their children, to live dignified lives after wartime sexual violence and forced marriage. The theory has four intersecting themes. The first theme is place-based justice realizable when women own land to live on. Land fulfills senses of home, identity and belonging. Secondly, compensation-based justice offers recognition of suffering, shattered dreams and time lost in abduction. Thirdly, needs-based justice enables lives of dignity by enhancing women’s livelihoods, children’s education, and housing. The fourth theme is relationship-based justice that involves love, acceptance and recognition of women’s victimhood, citizenship and humanity from their families, communities, and government. These four themes intersect to enable lived justice and contributes knowledge on justice and reparations for wartime sexual and gender-based violence especially literature that reckon with senses of justice.

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The most urgent ethical task in the face of genocide is the demand to stop it. But how can the seeming moral clarity of opposition to genocide be reconciled with the failure of adequate political responses? I begin by problematizing the demand and response through the lens of the Save Darfur movement that mobilized millions of people against genocide in the 2000s, and which I suggest articulates the ethical and political challenges at the core of genocide research and its goal of prevention. Within current models of anti-genocide activism, the response remains problematically restricted to the execution of international legal principles and attempts to persuade politicians in powerful countries to “do the right thing” and intervene. In this dissertation, I argue that the ethical demand to stop genocide calls us to imagine anti-genocide activism otherwise.To this end, I retrace the activist call of “never again” to its roots in the Shoah (Holocaust) through theories of witnessing that disturb the positionality of activists in the face of total destruction. The position of the witness clarifies the initial ethical and political challenges of anti-genocide activism as problems of responsibility or the possibility of response. I then conceptualize the gap between the demand and the response as the fault-line of responsibility, which splits open along the faces of ethics and politics. The phenomenological approaches of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt make sensible the ethical and political dimensions of responsibility in the full depth of the fault. The tension I stress in the faultline thus resists totalizing narratives of salvation on the one hand, and dehumanizing instrumentalization of restrictive concepts on the other. In the gap of the faultline, questions of judgement and justice open up as situated, contingent, and pluralistic. Attending to the irreducible gap maintains the possibility of response without yielding answers; instead, the separation of the ethical call to respond from political action opens the space and time for a ritualized, collective movement that can take us from thinking to action and back again: praxis. The task at hand is to prepare anti-genocide activists for the restlessness of the questions.

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In January 1979, a ship ferrying armed Ugandan exiles and members of the Tanzanian army sank on Lake Victoria. Up to three hundred people are believed to have died on that ship, at least one hundred and eleven of them Ugandan. There is no commemoration or social memory of the account. This event is uncanny, incomplete and yet is an insistent memory of the 1978-79 Liberation war, during which the ship sank. From interviews with Ugandan war veterans, and in the tradition of the Luo-speaking Acholi people of Uganda, I present wer, song or poetry, an already existing form of resistance and reclamation, as a decolonizing project. Drawing from political memory in postcolonial, African, Black, Indigenous and Diaspora studies, I argue that truth-telling, a fundamental aspect of reconciliation and restoration of justice among the Acholi, can be achieved through poetic expression. This dissertation extends the technical definition of Okot p’Bitek’s Song school of poetry to include form and content and the space for social and political commentary in various voices and landscapes. The poet as historian, and the artist as ruler, both Okot p’Bitek’s concepts, are illustrated through “Songs of Soldiers”. This work is deeply rooted in displacement and the desire to return – continuing factors in where and how I think about and articulate myself.

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In the aftermath of nearly three decades of conflict in northern Uganda, children born into the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) experience social, economic, and political exclusion. Thousands were born to mothers and often fathers who were abducted by the LRA and forced to marry inside the rebel group. The children are part of a global population of people born of sexual violence in conflict. This dissertation contributes to the small but growing body of work on this population called ‘children born of war.’ Using a child-centered methodology, this study is grounded in the everyday experiences of 29 children born into the LRA, with data collected at various points over a period of eight months between 2011 and 2016 in northern Uganda. The following research questions guided my inquiry: 1) How do the children experience their everyday social lives? 2) How do they make sense of their experiences? 3) What strategies and resources do they use or access to help navigate their everyday lives? 4) What macro and micro processes lend insight into or explain these experiences? To answer these questions, I developed a conceptual framework consisting of the ideas of a) the politics of belonging, inclusive of place-based, and b) nation-building and hegemonic masculinity. The findings point to the role of place-making in shaping the children’s social experiences. Careful examination of their everyday lives reveals the children’s efforts to negotiate the boundaries of their exclusion in effort to navigate toward better positions in life. Through drawings, journals, storytelling, and play, I interpret how the children make sense of their experiences and construct a sense of legitimacy despite their marginalization. By situating their experiences within current and historical political forces, their everyday experiences become intelligible as central to a local and national politics of belonging.

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This thesis examines the homing experiences of LGBT refugees in Vancouver, British Columbia. Using participatory photography, ethnography, and oral history, this project interrogates home and belonging for individuals claiming and receiving asylum based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The issues examined lie at the intersection of two ongoing discussions in migration scholarship: on race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity in refugee settlement in Canada, and on home and belonging for LGBT refugees. This examination contributes to both of these discussions. The research suggests reimagining refugee settlement in Canada through the lens of sexualized and gendered bodies in order to queer refugee settlement and expand the scope of home and belonging beyond the pragmatic to aspects of relatedness to places, bodies, and persons. LGBT refugees are caught in between two “(un)homey” places, Canada and their home countries, in which they experience marginalization as queer minorities. LGBT refugees’ experiences challenge the binary between home and homelessness/ displacement and emplacement. Home is not cemented in Vancouver or LGBT refugees’ countries of origin. It rests in the attachments LGBT refugees make with different places, communities, and their own bodies. The relationships LGBT refugees maintain between Canada and their countries serves as a necessary means for them to create a sense of home. These transnational relationships push homemaking outside of the heterosexual neoliberal nation-state and challenge static concepts of home. The fluidity of transnational relationships for LGBT refugees challenges the conceptualization of “home” within policy and academic literatures on settlement. This research unsettles homonational narratives around Canada being a progressive safe haven and discourses about “saving” LGBT refugees.Finally, the thesis reflects on the potential role of the activist-scholar in working with persons living precarious lives in precarious situations, and the responsibilities held by both the researcher and participants in documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting LGBT refugees’ experiences of home and belonging.

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