Self-settled Refugees in Uganda: An Alternative Approach to Displacement?

This paper investigates the complex security and economic dynamicsthat influence the lives and opportunities of self-settled refugeesliving in Uganda. It focuses on the opportunities and problemsfaced by self-settled refugees, and questions the assumptionthat Uganda's current local settlement policy is best suitedto the country's social, economic and political realities. Itsuggests that far from being passive victims, self-settled refugeesare taking control of their lives without any additional externalassistance and are planning for the day they can return to theirhomeland. Consequently, the paper argues that there is reasonto believe that local integration is likely to succeed whereother models have failed.     

Confronting the Reality of Gender-based Violence in Northern Uganda

Two decades of conflict in northern Uganda have had a devastatingimpact on the lives of thousands of civilians. Like so manyof today's ‘dirty wars,’ gender-related crimes havebeen pervasive. While numerous disciplines over the past centuryhave developed sophisticated theories for understanding thenature and agency surrounding sexual offences, the nascent fieldof transitional justice is only just beginning to grapple withthese issues or design appropriate measures of redress. Thispaper is based on research undertaken to look at issues of gender-basedviolence (GBV) in four camps for the internally displaced innorthern Uganda in order to provide insight into the natureand prevalence of GBV within a specific context. The findingsshow that specific GBV dynamics need to be scrutinised withinzones of conflict and taken into consideration in the policiesadopted post-conflict. The paper both illuminates the natureof such abuses within the Ugandan context and points to theneed for concerted attention to be paid to the pervasive genderdimensions of violence when designing transitional justice mechanisms.