UGANDA: TGW POST-WAR DISPLACEMENT AND EMPLOYMENT IN GULU CITY, THE SOCIAL CRITIQUE-DAN KOMAKECH, GULU UNIVERSITY DOWN

 

Analytical and Methodological Framing

Argued we sought to unsettle the dominant episodic causality model of war-related displacement, to a

complex and cyclical displacement that occurs in both times of war and peace (Purdekova, 2016,

2023). By implication, we therefore interrogated the singular notion of war as a problematic category or unit of analysis in understanding displacement. The objective was to complicate the linear causality and its analytical model that characterizes dominant literature, on war-related displacement. We demonstrated instead, how peace as well, is co-constitutive in the understanding of displacement, just as much as war is. This is particularly important when

 

uncertainties define the peace, which makes people choose instead, to flee peace by getting re-displaced.

The research carried out by Dr. Daniel Komakech, Director of Research Gulu University examine the social characters of the community living in Acholi Sub Region, with specific detail analyst case study in Gulu City. From 1985 to date apart from Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa who call the sort in Acholi Sub Region.

The argument amidst the Acholi community, whoever, is good position look at his or her stomach, not bather whether his kins and kits has been employee, whether famine, long spell Clamantly is imminent, nobody care.

When Ebola epidemic stroke Acholi Sub Region in year 2000, it was James Ojera Latigo and Ambrose Oola, the former Prime Minister of Acholi Ker Kwaro with group of the Acholi elders, went and consult the Jok Pajule deity, Lagoro to find out why Ebola, the Lagoro deity in his responses asked them why they allow many bloods to be lost.

According to the late James Ojera Latigo, “Jok Lagoro instructed them to go with an Axe and strike the bench river Aswa, and immediately the Ojera James Latigo and his company did what Lagoro commanded, Ebola stopped”

And when the Locusts spread to Acholi Sub Region in 2020, the late James Latigo and Acholi Elders went and consulted Jok Lagoro, later Acholi Deity demanded that black Ram, and Honey from Ogo yat should be brought, the late Gulu Residence District Commissioner Okot Santo Lapolo provided Horney from Ogo yat, while the then Minister for Disaster Hilary Onek Obaloker provided the Ram

GULU CITY-MONDAY JUNE 19,2026

By Okumu Livingstone Langol, (Uganda Correspondent)

 

Prof Daniel Komakech, the Director of Research, Gulu University carried out the research on analytical and Methodological Framing,he argued we sought to unsettle the dominant episodic causality model of war-related displacement, to a complex and cyclical displacement that occurs in both times of war and peace (Purdekova, 2016, 2023).

By implication, we therefore interrogated the singular notion of war as a problematic category or unit of analysis in understanding displacement. The objective was to complicate. The detail research finding are as follows:

Drawing from the empirical cases of displacement and emplacement (entrenchment) of post-war young people in Gulu city, we enhance a shift from conflict-related displacement theorised within the context of war, to a peace-displacement trajectory.

Consequently, the case and demonstration of displacement (re-displacement) into Gulu city in the times of peace, particularly focusing on; the trans-temporal visualisation (imagined futures), social character of fleeing and displacement, entrenchment and emplacement, should make us rethink our dominant causal model of a conflict-related displacement.

This research work is a result of a one-year fieldwork carried out in Gulu city between January to November, 2024. Drawing upon primary data of in-depth ethnographic field case stories, interviews and studies of four (4) interlocutors (young people) and their family members (spouses, kin and kith), we locate this study in the broader urban anthropology and the intersection between urban and conflict studies.

We argue that the subject of post-conflict displacement and imagined emplacement in urban spaces has been under-studied. While building on direct observation and being an insider, we foreground the young peoples’ sensibilities and tactics to navigate and negotiate a social becoming and approved presence. The objective was to situate a critical assessment of the impact of post-conflict displacement and imagined

emplacement in Gulu city. Consequently, how precarious situations are reproduced, re-igniting an intense sensibility and tactics to acquire and retain emplacement. The geographical area of Gulu city as a case study, was chosen to provide empirical basis to appreciate the complex nature of displacement, emplacement and the modes required to attain a social becoming by the young people.

 

The research drew from a range of formal to informal engagements. The followings were widely utilized; observation, listening to stories and narratives, interviews, and followed four (4) cases,

in a case studies mode. We therefore solicited about 20 young people in the city, and a diverse set of people, including, 10 opinion leaders, 10 members of the security, 10 local leaderships in the divisions in Gulu city, 10 community members and 4 case studies. The informal engagements with; a few colleagues that came over for coffee, talking with boda-boda riders as they take me to

my destination, casual chats with friends, over the issues of displacement and emplacement, were insightful. This took the shape of casual chats and reflections over coffee, boda-boda riding, taking a walk or hanging around.

The jokes, remarks, individual or ‘special’ requests (for money

to help in treating a child or relative), were fruitful as well. It was the case that, the less structured the engagement, the natural, relaxed and therefore, the better the replies. Similarly, the opportunity offered by informal engagement, allowed for asking and clarifying many more questions, making the perspectives clearer or deeply reflected upon.

To be able to appreciate and understand the field data, we sought interpretation and translation from the local Gulu city setting. In the same vein, the observations were reinterpreted in the context in which the behavior, actions, words and voices were performed. The cityscape of Gulu was not simply a geographical place of being located, but space to read and learn. To protect

informants, their identities were anonymised or, use of pseudonyms was preferred. Lastly, the study makes no claim to total insights. Rather, it tries to capture some insights as much as possible.

The limitations of the study are as follows: It did not cover the whole of northern Uganda but, rather specific to Gulu city. As such, it did not focus on the national phenomenon of displacement and emplacement. In the section that follows, we very briefly theories the genealogy of displacement and emplacement. The objective is to provide background narrative, debate and entanglements.

Re-defining War-related and Peace-related Displacements While war generates large-scale dislocation (Elliott 2014:128), it also enhances immobility in the sense of ruins and ghost towns, while mobility is conceptualised in terms of speed, flight and

displacements (McElroy et al 2012). However, as Vigh (2018) shows, one may be displaced but this displacement is not in the physical sense of up-rootedness or leaving one’s home or house or

location. But rather, how the surrounding and landscape becomes unfamiliar or strange and so, one is therefore, disconnected. Similarly, one may be emplaced, but this emplacement is not to

be interpreted in the physical form of being rooted, but rather, one may be displaced physically, in order to get emplaced. In this state, one’s agency of sensibility and tactically (tactics) has a

utility or teleological end of taking or catapulting one into the state of being visible, recognised and living a livable life.

This is the idea of social becoming within which we can begin to see the embeddedness of flight, displacement and navigation. In light of this, we begin to notice how the two-decade experience of the civil war in northern Uganda, and subsequent physical displacements in the internally displaced peoples’ camps (IDPs) can be elaborated in view of displacement and emplacement.

In this IDP as a new site, this new ‘home’ became unfamiliar and strange, from which flight was desired and preferred. In both cases, there was an embedded desire of flight from this unfamiliar and strange locality to the cityscape from which to re-imagine new capacities of being visible and socially

recognised (Dolan 2009).

 

There is an additional way in which to view displacement and emplacement tendencies in war, time register. The strange and the unfamiliar landscape becomes a moment of rest but not the end or final stage of flight. In this case, both the physical small and crowded IDPs into which 1.6million (Southwick 2005:106) or 1.8 million (Branch 2013:3152) Acholi were in, made flight an

everyday yearning. Suitcases in the houses were arranged for a short notice flight as much as hesitations to buy more durable items even when cheap or affordable they were, indicated

tendencies of departure. They were a manifestation of the materiality of movements but also, continued uncertainties (Baines 2010) for further movements (Motasim 2008:13). This very

locality which was momentarily a place (and not home), was a time of moment, a time of rest and a time of wait, comparable to a bus park, office or hotel lounge, where one’s sitting point is transient and only occupied for a time, waiting dislocation or movement. That which is called

‘place’, takes on another nodal meaning, a transient meaning of mobility itself. It is a non-place (as opposed to no place), a lowly state of landscape, with a next move propensity. A brake point, a break point to brake-step and momentarily converge in this place – as it were in the IDPs.

Therefore, the place and the occupied huts or ‘house’ were mobile (mobile units) moving, as the occupant moved, becoming a moving object. In effect, it was not the physical place or homes moving but rather, people as infrastructure of movement, carrying along with them, place and home.

A movement from that which is unfamiliar and frightening while at the same time, flight from being invisibilised to a terrain of visibility or recognition. This terrain, this landscape, is the

city and in this case, Gulu city. The choice of w h y Gulu city for which flight was made, will be explained in the subsequent sections.

Consequently, the flight from the IDPs and other spaces of wait, to Gulu city, required an intensified deployment of circulation, to afford legibility and navigation of the cityscape. The legibility was to assist in re-presenting, holding up or having a grip on the city potentials or itsactual.

The agency of sensibility and tactics of navigation, was to make, re-make or innovatively alter the register of Gulu city to favor them. It is in Gulu city that the overlapping or layered histories of the conflict or its effects became more intense. The incessant navigation and maneuver as we shall see, are moments of show of displacement and emplacement, while the subsidiary effort is to re-establish a certain social, economic as well as cultural order of visibility.

This convergence, this presence in the registry of Gulu city was not only the crowding but also the alterations of the speed of Gulu cityscape. This has since made city life unfold in a spectacular way, with many things; street with moving people, animals like goats, dogs and cows who are themselves in a fast-moving mode, speeding vehicles, communications, information and?

gossips across vectors of navigations of all kinds. However, there is little trade and slow commerce. This slow commerce means, there is a narrow path into the city while at the same time, necessitating sharper lenses of viewing the cityscape for hidden or erstwhile

 

unnoticed opportunities. For that matter, engaging the city into another gear of speed mode necessitated further acceleration to try and catch the city or catch up with the city. While those

whose ways of things were slow or yet to unfold, were in a state of brakes, a ‘brake and go’, and a ‘go and brake’, slowing the city, the more dynamic young people transformed the speed and the

city ways of things. It is this complex character that Gulu has gained over time as a city with two speeds, that made Branch (2013) to proclaim it as; a city with layered cityscape. In situations as

fleeing the IDPs and the villages, Gulu city had to be held with a firm grip and not to be lost since there was presumably, no any other cityscape in Acholi sub-region to try out life. This

made Gulu city a dire as well as a privileged site for making ends meet. It was and is dire because, it is the alternative moment of displacement and emplacement, and no other.

Its dense registry, intensified its transformation in all directions and circuits. It is here that post- war uncertainties, have mobilised young people to negotiate survival. In the next section, I draw on this, to situate and elaborate the survival sensibilities and tactics.

Sensibilities and Tactics In a combined experience of war time and the dense circulations in the cityscape, sensibility is

required in order to survive. These sensibilities are not to be deployed at its very basic but rather, at its best. Like the experience of abduction, living in the bush and plotting escape that the returnees endured, these and many young people also learned to employ all the senses in an intense way. The rebellion of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its incursion in northern

Uganda and Acholi, in particular, made many young people to learn to decode, to see through, to sieve, to read, to recognised tones and modes, and all that they probably meant.

T o m a n y y o u n g p e o p l e t h a t e s c a p e d f r o m t h e L R A c a p t i v i t y, knew the very basic idea of escape being carefully planned with all the details, waiting for a crack in the command structure or laxity thereof, to strike a move towards escape. Similarly, those in the IDPs also

lived in a constant uncertainty of whether the LRA rebels would strike or not. As a result, keeping alert, listening intensely to conversations and reading signs or government troop movements, as important scripts. This sensibility became a certain mode of intercepting and interrogating one’s surroundings and experiences to gain or pin down some number of insights of what really was the case or what else it offered as it unfolded or disclosed itself.

Sensibility as in the case of wartime, was not only about taking an insight or good reading of situations in order to take precautions, but was also positively mobilised as life enhancing capacity to stay afloat. While sustained and carried along in the cityscape, it carried a special position in the dense relation and circulations. As a skill gained in the war-time, in this space of continued uncertainties, young people gathered as strangers to each other and so, everybody was weary about everybody else, just like it was in the case of war-time. As a result, there was a constant reading – ‘reading-as’, and constant ‘over-seeing’, trying to figure out what is more than what is less, in peoples’ every day. Yet on another scale, the crowding of bodies or subjects in the city, added to the complexities of the continued displacements. As bodies disperse and mingle far and wide in the arteries and

 

Understanding Gulu City

hinterland of the cityscape, the pressure of staying afloat was doubled or tripled. This therefore required an intensified sensibility into things and relations with other bodies. While speed was mounted to move ahead of everyone, brakes of ‘stop’ and ‘go’, were most preferred. Speed a s w a s o b s e r v e d , crashes one since it was oblivious to insights and details. While it became apparent that, brakes enabled careful maneuver. Here, intuition was useful as much as the senses, to read beforehand, to discern before being confronted, and to lay strategies before somebody else did the same. At the same time, there were fall back positions or schemes laid as well, should the others have got ahead of you. Distinction, being timid to speak or utter, staying low,

being illegible or opaque, as well as having many tongues, were not moral issues but rather

strategies often deployed to try and outwit others who were probably up to the same strategies.

Once all or majority are self-styled in an illegible moment, rates of illegibility make the city

more and more opaque, which yet again, needs more and more reading and insights, calling in, a

further intensification of sensibility. From the stand point of self-representation, positions were

taken to enhance agency and tactics to navigate and outwit. It was a progressive shift from

moods of interrogating myriads of happenings, into swinging into actions to instrumentalise the

materiality of the cityscape for social becoming. In shifting the contours of sensibility to that of

agentic maneuver, tactics for this dense cityscape was not only required but also intertwined with

sentiments of fear of being crowded out or being ‘displaced back home” (Vigh 2015:233) or

engulfed in a “bad surrounding” (Sverker 2008) once again. However, all these take place in

Gulu-city, imposing Gulu as central to this study. In the section that follows, we follow a little bit

why Gulu city was central, looking at its positioning during the war, in the post and persistent

experience (s).

 

The city of Gulu has been ‘globalised’ to a certain degree in terms of its urban architecture,

leisure services, markets, arts and food culture. Diaspora, international aid workers and

volunteers’ movements and urban engagements, have shaped the global character of Gulu urban

space. There is numerous coffee shops, pizza, hamburger and other fast foods that have sprung

up to serve a discerning local and international clientele. While, at social levels, more and more

international music – classical opera and solos, are played as well. Local craft and tailoring are

booming together with ‘summer’ or ‘vacation’ homes, ‘apartments’ or ‘studio’ rooms. These

dynamics went along with processes of gentrification (Büscher & Vlassenroot, 2010). But also,

the city main centers also sit in an inviolable double, with the sprouting luxury development and

coffee points living side by side with broken or collapsed and demolished houses that are yet

fallow and to be gentrified. The roads until recently when government tarmacked the main

centers, were largely murram with frequent organised demonstrations over impassible murram

roads by the locals, as Odokonyero puts it (2013). But also, those roads with tarmac or recently

tarmacked, lack planned road-parking and good drainage. Drainage is particularly a challenge.

When it rains, it pours, it floods (using the words picked from Orji (2018) and the sewer pipes

burst open, flowing into the streets (Odokonyero, ibid.).

 

 

Gulu city realities demonstrate strong inequalities, precarity, and poverty. With the war coming

to an end in 2006, Gulu is a post-conflict city. Yet, as Beall and Goodfellow (2011) have argued,

the end of civil war did not make an end to civic conflict and the post-conflict social crisis

amongst urban youth as Branch (2013) confirms this. The continuation of conflict dynamics in

the post-conflict period is described for example by Vigh in Crisis and Chronicity:

 

Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline, explaining how the Guinea-

Bissau youths experienced the existential ambiguity in which ‘things only go from bad to worse’

 

(2008:6). Henrik observes how conflict is not a passing period of chaos, but rather settles as a

social state, shifting from a state of emergency to a situation of emergency, a settled life of

uncertainty. This reconstructive vision of conflict prompts Denov and Buccitelli (2013)

observation of conflict and crisis being chronic and endemic in post-war period. Conflict and

crisis in that sense is both visible and receded to the invisible background, acquiring what Vigh

calls “an enduring hold on people and societies as it becomes endemic rather than episodic

(ibid.:15). In all these, one sees that the difference between war and peace is blurred, with

conflict acquiring what Tausig (1992) calls, “an air of social and existential consistency”.

Gulu city as a de-facto city of the displaced, offers us this purview and from which tendencies of

navigating enduring and chronic conflict is elaborated. In this shifting from ‘state of emergency’

to ‘situation of emergency’ in a constant improvising in a terrain of chronic state, Gulu city shows

and elaborates the uncertainties of post war realities. For example, the dynamics of return and

reintegration of formerly abducted people or ex-LRA soldiers and wives have added to the

complex challenges of post-conflict cohesion, as has been described in detail by a number of

researchers (Porter 2017, Baines 2009, 2017, Dolan 2009). Several ex-combatants have chosen

to reintegrate in the urban tissue of Gulu city instead of returning to their rural homes. In the

middle of all these, people are weary of each other and therefore, there are minimal interactions.

Worse still, those considered or known as former LRA combatants, are gazed at with a look of

contempt while the former combatants try at that moment to tactically elude the contemptuous

gaze by looking elsewhere or hurriedly walk pass. While women who were abused as sex slaves

by LRA are for most part shunned by the male town dwellers as ‘overused’ and with ‘little’ value

left. But there is still a segment of the former LRA combatants who are considered very useful;

they are called the ‘bouncers’ (for their skills of dispersing riots or stampede and their physical

build-up) in the mushrooming discotheques and social places in Gulu city, to quell any possible

violations in the dance arena. While at the same time, the security companies have hired many

former LRA combatants to work as night guards in certain establishments or installations.

Overtime, social exclusions, social despair, and poverty in the post-war city of Gulu, contribute

to a general state of ‘alert’. For example, this state of alert is reflected in the urban everyday

infrastructure of reinforcing doors and windows with burglar proofs while new constructions

take these precautions as a given. As street lights line up and bright in places that are installed, in

many parts, the city is dark and worrisome. Many city dwellers dodge these dark parts as they

are also considered, ‘dark spots’ for pickpockets. But this ‘dark spots’ are also placeholders for

street children to return to after circulating around. Whereas they bond amongst themselves and

familiar with all the corners including politics and gossips of the city, those relatively better in

the city trajectory, consider the street children as a problem whose wild manners ‘stinks and

spreads’, even when many are not, but simply socially excluded (an issue we shall return to, in

 

another paper). Most times, the street children ignore and push on with life, ‘cooking their head

(Finding cracks in the city to take advantage of or utilise). While the unemployed or

unemployable youths flock the bright lit parts of the city at night or at day break, to come and

‘watch’ or ‘play’ a football match – betting. When a match ‘scores’ (to mean, his betting won), the

Indian who owns the betting house is rushed to for the prompt payment and immediately the

young man gets lost in the thin air but probably after a bottle of beer to ‘rest’ from the tedious

‘playing’. For those who lost the ‘match’, they return to a gathering of their peers as they curse life

and the ‘bad’ politics. This normally happens in a boda boda stage which at that moment is no

longer a boda boda stage but a ‘parliament’, a mobile parliament with the members choosing the

topics for debate according to the daily life events.

Households also engage in combined urban livelihoods, particularly, in the informal sector. In

this tenacity of life, the informal sector of household manuever to make life livable, has invaded

the arteries of Gulu city. Most of the streets have crowded-out earlier city planning of the streets,

open spaces such as the verandahs, and as such, now populated with households selling roast

maize, sweet bananas, oranges and so forth. While hawkers with their items to sell, ply the

streets often traversing spaces considered private or enclosed, have perfected their routes. There

is also another segment whose maneuvering capacities have halted or no more life-enhancing and?

have resorted to begging. This segment is largely composed of the young girls between 7-10 and

the elderly who are at their evening of their lives.

They deploy themselves in soft spots to theemotion, such as the church and coffee shops or restaurants. Quite skillful, they wait and see when a man is with a lady and they come and beg. In this case, the presence of the lady-folk with the gentleman becomes life enhancing since the man culturally has to show worth and capacity, forcing him to give. On the other, the middle class of Gulu also are in a struggling circuit.

Although they stay either within the city or its outskirt which is popularly considered better, they have also crafted a meta-nodal informality. Some mostly females, have turned to hawking of an improved sort. They carry their items; perfumes, lotions, fruits and so forth to sell in their offices or, through phone calls. While some men in the upscale, bet from their offices with laptops, trying their luck. Others read newspapers to see new adverts for consultancies or fieldwork.

All these are to do with crafting the everyday survival in the current precarity of the dense city with

many livelihoods challenge. In the section that follows, we case study the trajectory of Gulu city, by focusing on a more specific group, a group of young people – young men, whose household obligations, are trapped up in this precarious condition of the complex uncertainties. Building on their agency in a dense city of entanglement and specifically, the precarity of household life, we detail 4 stories in this context. We elaborate on how displacement and emplacement as clarified in the earlier section position young men in an elaborate sensibility and tactics in an intertwining and mutual way, to respond to the precarious conditions of uncertainties