Analysing the role of football in building social cohesion in war-affected Uganda

Madeleine Issitt and Aloh Francis find out just how successful football is in developing social harmony in post-conflict areas

The power of naked protest in a shrinking democratic space

Even while new technologies transform political protest, citizens continue to use their bodies in acts of civil resistance. In northern Uganda, citizens are using public nakedness to protest land dispossession by an increasingly authoritarian state, which grants the protester forms of power and highlights constraints on political speech

Naked bodies and collective action: repertoires of protest in Uganda’s militarised, authoritarian regime

How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes—and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with country- or region-wide political action

Collaborative autoethnography and reclaiming an African episteme: investigating “customary” ownership of natural resources

Collaborative autoethnography can function as a means of reclaiming certain African realities that have been co-opted by colonial epistemes and language. This can be significant in very concrete ways: northern Uganda is suffering a catastrophic loss of tree cover, much of which is taking place on the collective family landholdings that academia and the development sector have categorized as “customary land.” A collaboration by ten members of such landholding families, known as the Acholi Land Lab, explores what “customary ownership” means to them and their relatives, with a view to understanding what may be involved in promoting sustainable domestic use of natural resources, including trees

Restoration and renewal through sport: gendered experiences of resilience for war-affected youth in northern Uganda

Building on the proposal for a ‘culturally sensitive’ framework of resilience, this article explores the construction of resilience at an individual and community level. Through the lens of sport, we explore the relational nature of resilience and its relationship to ideas of morality and community well-being. Using interviews and focus groups conducted across northern Uganda 2018–2020, we engage youth perspectives on resilience or restoration (roco). We emphasise the gendered dimensions that shape different stakeholder’s understandings of the concept and that, in this context, the pursuit of a community-affirmed vision of resilience or good surroundings (piny maber) reinforces pre-existing inequalities