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

北方乌干达在1986年左右开始并于2006年在乌干达境内结束的上帝抵抗军叛乱期间和之后不久经历了世界上最臭名昭著的强迫流离失所事件之一。北方乌干达的流离失所问题值得注意的是，其持续时间很长-有些地区长达十多年;而且从2002年左右开始，受影响地区的所有农村人口都流离失所，其中包括所有农村阿乔利地区的人口-约100万人-还有80万人来自邻近社区。在冲突的头16年里，几乎没有向受影响人口提供人道主义援助，这种援助只是在2003年之后才真正开始。然而，在接下来的十年里，虽然人口流离失所，后来从2007年开始返回并重建家园，但大量国际资金被花费。援助部署在有形基础设施、支持国家安全、教育和保健服务、解除武装、复员和重返社会方案、建设和平和过渡时期司法举措以及农业和其他生计发展方面。北方乌干达的行动是国际干预的典范。在冲突期间和冲突结束后，有一个人道主义阶段，在返回和重新安置阶段有一个过渡阶段，然后是发展干预措施，使受战争影响的人口能够收复因流离失所和战争造成的一些失地，帮助他们达到与该国其他地区相同的发展水平。与许多冲突和冲突后环境相比，乌干达北方的情况比较简单。安全、政治和后勤方面的挑战都是可以应付的，上帝军的冲突在公众中引起足够高的关注，各国政府和国际机构提供了大量资金。可以合理地假定，在乌干达北方的干预行动已尽可能地做到了这些，但几乎没有试图从乌干达的经验中吸取教训。本研究旨在通过了解流离失所和返回，通过有关人员的看法和理解来纠正这一缺陷。其结果将是一系列研究，这些研究共同评价的不是具体的干预措施，而是不同部门累积干预措施的实际经验。它将研究社区对自己的应对策略和复原力的理解;他们在解释冲突后恢复时期的概念时对社会资本和民间社会的现状以及帮助和阻碍的因素;以及十年来国际援助干预措施如何影响他们的生活，这些干预措施主要是“现成的”，但有时尝试更有针对性的东西。从这个意义上说，该项目将解决人道主义发展方面的有罪不罚现象，这种现象是由于忽视-也许是主动拒绝-学习机会而造成的，迄今为止在乌干达北方就出现了这种情况。我们的目标是建立一个以社区为中心的跨部门干预后评价模式。研究小组很快将完成司法与安全研究方案的工作，该方案一直在填补关于普通人在中部非洲安全方面的经验以及提供安全服务的公共当局-实际上往往不是国家-的巨大知识空白。强迫流离失所方案将以这一模式和经验为基础，力求通过受影响人民的生活现实来理解流离失所和回返问题，同时挑战发展行业的舒适假设。我们预测，不同部门的干预措施将在其长期成果方面为民众带来正面和负面的体验，这一经验将以能够影响其他冲突后环境中的干预措施的方式传播。

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.