Trajectories of displacement: A multi-disciplinary exploration into return and social repair after mass displacement in northern Uganda

Northern Uganda experienced one of the world's most notorious instances of forced displacement during and immediately after the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency, which started around 1986 and ended on Ugandan soil in 2006. Northern Ugandan displacement was notable for its duration - in some areas for well over a decade; and for the fact that it involved the entire rural populations of the affected areas from around 2002, including all of rural Acholiland - around one million people - with a further eight hundred thousand from neighbouring communities. For the first 16 years of the conflict there was virtually no humanitarian assistance to the affected population, which only began in earnest after 2003. However for the following ten years, while the population was displaced and later, from 2007, returning to and re-establishing their homes, large amounts of international funding were spent. Aid was deployed on physical infrastructure, support for state security, education and health services, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, peacebuilding and transitional justice initiatives, and agricultural and other livelihoods development.
Northern Uganda's was a model international intervention. There was a humanitarian phase during and immediately after the conflict, a transition phase during the return and resettlement phase, followed by development interventions to enable the war affected population to regain some of the lost ground caused by displacement and war, to help them attain the same level of development as the rest of the country. Compared to many conflict and post-conflict environments, northern Uganda's was straightforward. The security, political and logistical challenges were all manageable and the LRA conflict was of a sufficiently high public profile that funds provided by governments and international institutions were substantial. The intervention in northern Uganda was, it is reasonable to assume, done as well as these things can be done.
However there has been little attempt to learn from the Ugandan experience. This research aims to correct this deficiency through understanding displacement and return through the perceptions and understandings of the people concerned. The outcome will be a series of studies that together evaluate not so much specific interventions but the lived experience of cumulative interventions in different sectors. It will look at communities' understandings of their own coping strategies and resilience; of the current state of their social capital and civil society as they interpret the notions and what has helped and hindered in the post-conflict recovery period; and of how ten years of international aid interventions, largely 'off the shelf' but sometimes attempting something more targeted, have affected their lives. In this sense the project will address humanitarian-development impunity, which is fostered by neglect - perhaps active rejection - of learning opportunities, as has been seen so far in northern Uganda. We aim to create a model for community-centred post-intervention evaluation across sectors.
The research team are soon to conclude work on the Justice and Security Research Programme, which has been filling a massive knowledge gap on the experiences of ordinary people around security in Central Africa, and what are the public authorities - in practice very often not the state - which provide security services. The forced displacement programme will build on this model and this experience, seeking to understand displacement and return through the lived realities of affected people, in the process challenging the comfortable assumptions of the development industry. We predict that interventions in different sectors will emerge as positively and negatively experienced by populations in terms of their long-term outcomes, and that this learning will be disseminated in ways that can influence interventions in other post conflict settings.

Our overall impact goal is to produce high quality evidence-based research to inform national and international policies and practices in sites of widespread displacement and return in Central Africa and potentially further afield. The research will benefit four main groups:
1. Local populations in conflict affected places who desire human security, peace and poverty alleviation. We believe that the everyday experiences of local populations in conflict-affected situations ought to drive both policy and research agendas. The research project will have an impact on local populations in conflict-affected places by assisting the development of policies and practices based on evidence of the set of functioning regulatory structures and norms used by local populations in sites of mass displacement and return, rather than merely those that have been defined for them. Thus we recognise the urgent need, working through our strong local networks of researchers, civil society leaders and customary authorities to involve returnee populations in the research process and to draw local researchers and research assistants into all aspects of research design. We also recognise the need to involve local collaborators in dissemination.
2. Policy makers -by generating recommendations and strategies to strengthen current approaches and interventions related to persistent conflict and endemic violence in our research sites. Policy that delivers real human security in conflict affected areas must be designed to work effectively in complex and contested local environments, characterized by competing interests and hybrid public authority structures. Central Africa today is witnessing what the UNHCR has termed 'immense forced displacement totals' but is also a region witnessing large scale 'returns'. These return processes - which include both civilians and former combatants - are dynamic, contingent and fragile. They are also massively under-researched leading to an environment of humanitarian impunity whereby donors and implementers are able to ignore the views and interests of their purported 'beneficiaries'. Our evidence-based findings will be translated into succinct policy briefings containing infographics and actionable recommendations. These will be disseminated widely through our website and via twitter and will provide opportunities for knowledge exchange at annual stakeholder meetings in our research countries and at policy round-tables in London, Brussels and New York, the home cities of our institutions.
3. Publics - by promoting engagement with scientific evidence on how viable ways of life are constituted post return and/or how certain dynamics can lead to endemic and persistent conflict. Our stakeholder meetings and policy roundtables will strengthen networks among teaching and research institutions as well as the media in the UK, Uganda and Central African countries to help disseminate accessible research material, in the form of journalistic articles and blog discussion forums.
4. The next generation of development practitioners and Central African leaders. We see the training of a cadre of young development professionals as a key instrument in changing thinking and practice over the longer term. We will ensure access to improved educational opportunities for local researchers in researched countries, recognising the need to work with individuals to help foster a new generation of African leaders who can take our research findings forward. We can now do this systematically as part of the ground-breaking Programme for African Leadership (PfAL) scheme based at the LSE. This programme provides prestigious graduate scholarships in an effort to foster a new generation of African leaders who will promote the best practices of economic and social development in their respective organisations and countries.