The guns have fallen silent, and peace has returned to northern Uganda after two decades of brutal war against the LRA. The Acholi population has left the squalid camps where they were interned for years and returned to their land, and the long process of reconstruction and reconciliation has begun. Or so the official narrative proclaims—just as it had proclaimed the war to be a black-and-white struggle waged by the Ugandan government with their Western partners, seeking to rescue the civilian population from the terrorist LRA. Today, instead of humanitarianism, peace is the sign under which policies are legitimated and interventions occur, from reconciliation, development, reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reparations, to statebuilding, peacebuilding, protection, and transitional justice. They are being carried out by the Ugandan state, foreign states, and international bodies: whereas during the war there was a clear division of duties between the national and the international—the state focused on violence, while aid agencies provided rudimentary welfare and administration— now there is a significant convergence of national and international around common policies and interventions. However, given the divorce of the war-time narrative from actual events in the north, it is perhaps not surprising that today’s peace is rife with violence. Fighter jets roar overhead almost every day. The political protests in the wake of last year’s elections were met with extreme force, as they were in other urban areas of Uganda. Strange diseases erupt among the rural population, for whom the state has disavowed almost all responsibility, as it had during the war. Land, the only thing left to most people, is being lost through often violent dispossession. Paramilitaries occupy rural schools, game wardens have killed farmers, and the military is staking out land for its own use. The main town in the region, Gulu, is seeing rapid urbanization into slums, increasing poverty, inequality, and crime. The UPDF is spread throughout the region in the name of hunting the remnants of the LRA. US military contractors fly reconnaissance missions, drones buzz overhead, and US marines operate openly in Kitgum. Rumors circulate of new rebel groups and there is widespread talk of another war. How do we make sense of the fact that today’s peace is shot through with violence? That is the puzzle I start with. My approach will be to argue that this peace-time violence is not to be seen as a remnant of the war or as a product of social breakdown caused by the war, which can be solved with the consolidation of peace and more extensive peacebuilding. Instead, I argue that violence is a central element in the re-constitution of structures and relations of power in northern Uganda, a re-constitution that is occurring in the name of peace. Thus, violence and peace are not antithetical: the violence of peace is not residual, destructive, and non-political, but rather is productive political violence, pointing towards a specific future.