This dissertation focuses on the lives and memories of former Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in northern Uganda. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork from 2012- 2013, it dislodges master narratives about humanity. It illustrates the disconnect between the designation of certain forms of violence as opposed to humanity, and the actually lived experiences of those forms of violence by LRA rebels. While the LRA and their associated violence were often contextualized as brutal and inhumane, the stories and experiences of rebels spoke of that violence quite differently. Indeed, for many, including not only rebels but also civilians, the violence they had perpetrated and/or to which they had been subjected was neither wholly immoral nor simply `against humanity'. The meaning and complexity of that violence offered many more possibilities for and potentialities of life and could form the basis of both a subjectivity and an ethics. Under the cruel names given to practices such as `abduction' into and `captivity' within the LRA lay transformative experiences of sociality, conviviality, and kinship; reconfigured political understandings; changed spiritualities and relations to God; and a deep discontent with the everyday violence of peasant life in Acholi.The construction of `humanity' as a moral sentiment in line with the `humane' is revealed to be a peculiarly modern concept built against forms of `horrific' violence, including mutilation and forced marriage. `Humanity' as a form of being distinguished from `animality' is questioned through LRA experiences in the `bush' (lum). The Western concept of `rationality' as a key construct of the `human', particularly compared to the (African) `savage mind', is critiqued through LRA magic and science. The ethnographic evidence breaks down `humanity' in these and other iterations.Here, being `against humanity' means beginning to think about the richness and diversity of human life that exists outside certain notions of the good. `Humanity' unsuccessfully attempts to monopolize control over compassion, justice, and the moral good. Indeed, under some of the most innocent and well-meaning uses of `humanity' lie moralizing agendas that obfuscate the experiences and social relations of life on-the-ground. A concept useful for simplification, binarization, and distillation, `humanity' loses its value when it denies meaning and value to experiences, thoughts, or actions that disrupt the smooth way in which it divides good from evil, purifying the complexity of experience through the lens of what are ultimately value-judgments
