Truths out of place: homecoming, intervention, and story-making in war-torn northern Uganda

Abstract

During the last two decades, northern Uganda has been ravaged by a violent conflict between the Ugandan government and a rebel movement known as the Lord's Resistance Army. This article explores how children and youth formerly abducted by the rebels are confronted with a range of constructions of morality, time, and ‘deviance’ upon their return from the bush and how they experience the homecoming process of rehabilitation and reintegration. One argument is that the constructions promote a paradigm of their former lives in the bush as both ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’, which plays a significant role in shaping homecoming narratives. By scrutinizing how dominant classifications and narratives are created in a particular rehabilitation centre as well as how they are appropriated and negotiated by the returnees, this article throws light on some significant – but often misrecognized – conceptual and ethical dilemmas that interventionist agencies ought to face in contexts of the so-labelled ‘child soldiers’ and the event of homecoming.