Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army: the New Order no one ordered

The conflict in Northern Uganda is now in its 17th year. It pitches a rebel group, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army, against the Ugandan government and against its own people, the Acholi. The robustness of the conflict as a semi-permanent feature of the Ugandan condition for such a long time indicates that the forces working against peace appear to be stronger than the forces working for it. To understand the conflict, the complex genesis of the Northern war must be understood. It must be adequately explained why the insurgency occurred at all, why it did not occur at an earlier time and why it persists to this day. These conditions, once clarified, must be complimented by an analysis of the character of the LRA rebellion itself, often oversimplified and described in terms of its assumed millenarian character (with reference to the biblical Ten Commandments). The following analysis will first establish a brief historical perspective to the conflict in the North. It will then analyze the emergence of the conflict in terms of root causes and situational factors, and look at the question why the LRA rebellion adopted the format it did and why the war persists for all these years. It will finally look at the question of what next.