Making peace with the Lord's Resistance Army? Why peace processes fail.

Dr. Mareike Schomerus (Busara Center)

Making peace with the Lord's Resistance Army? Why peace processes fail - Dr. Mareike Schomerus (Busara Center)

Tuesday, 16 November 2021, 17:30-19:00 UK time

Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS + livestream (email ccrj@soas.ac.uk for the Zoom link)

In 2021, Dominic Ongwen, a leader of the notorious Ugandan armed group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was found guilty of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In early May, Ongwen was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The trial, the verdict and the sentence have been the subject of much controversy.

The prominence of the trial makes it easy to forget that Ongwen found himself in the dock in The Hague because the last peace process with the LRA had failed: the Juba Peace Talks. These talks were the first talks conducted under the influence of the ICC. They ended with a military strike on the LRA and since then, more than a decade later, wide-ranging political tension and marginalisation in Uganda have remained unaddressed; civilians in three countries in central Africa have suffered from armed group and military intervention violence; and the verdict against Ongwen is unlikely to bring closure to the many who have suffered.

Why did it come to this? Ultimately, because a peace process failed—and it failed because it failed to consider the experience of the LRA as it entered into peace talks.

Mareike Schomerus’ new book The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (CUP, 2021) offers an insight into how the LRA experienced the Juba Talks. Emphasising the developing dynamics and the deep distrust within the conflict system of which the LRA is part and how this became entrenched through the peace negotiations, the book calls for a new approach in contemporary peacemaking.

Mareike Schomerus (PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science) is Vice President at the Busara Center in Nairobi. She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance at ODI in London, and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium , also at ODI. At Busara, she heads the Center’s work that links behavioral science, fragility and violent conflict. She is a widely published researcher with a body of work on violent conflict, political contestation and peace processes in South Sudan and Uganda and across borders, as well as behavioral mechanisms in post-conflict recovery, for which she has developed a body of work on the ‘mental landscape’ of lives in or after situations of violence conflict. She is the co-editor of two volumes (on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan 2020, 2013) and author of the monographs The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Contact email: ccrj@soas.ac.uk