Moral spaces, and sexual transgression: understanding rape in war and post conflict

When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This article shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this article argues for a re-sexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms — and hence transgressions — vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the article sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war

Reimag [in] ing the village as a portrait of a nation-state in Uganda:

In this article I reexamine the ways in which certain contemporary artists based in Uganda problematize the narrative that the ruling National Resistance Movement (the NRM) party is the party of the rural poor (Cheeseman, Lynch, and Willis 2016) in their work while using it as a metaphor to inform their visual expression. I focus on the contest between tradition (imagined as a village) and modernity (imagined as a modern state), as well as the dilemma such a contest causes for a contemporary artist. Cornelius Adepegba (1995) argues that this dilemma influenced the African novel. Agreeing with Adepegba, Freeborn Odiboh (2009) observes that the same dilemma has shaped African visual artists, such as Abayomi Barber, and formal art education institutions like the Barber School in Nigeria; Odiboh then assesses the historical context in which this dilemma evolved as African nationalists struggled to forge postcolonial states based on a national consciousness amid competing ethnic, religious, and ideological interests