From Rupture to Fracture: A Decolonial Analysis of LRA Women Returnees in the Acholi Sub-region, Northern Uganda

The paper examines the reintegration of the women returnees from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda, contending that dominant reintegration frameworks, while constructed as humanitarian and restorative, reproduce colonial and patriarchal logics, engrained within postcolonial governance structures, and humanitarian agencies. These programs frequently depict women as mere beneficiaries of aid, as opposed to political agents with intricate, ruptured and fractured identities shaped by forced conscription and abduction, militarised socialisation, coerced motherhood and communal exclusion stemming from the protracted LRA civil conflict. This paper argues that the imposed depictions of these women depoliticise their war lived experiences by disintegrating their complex experiences of survival, resistance, and reconstitution, into simplistic narratives of victimhood and restoration. The paper adopts a decolonial feminist framework and feminist theory of subjectivity to significantly examine how enduring colonial legacies and ingrained colonial structures influence knowledge, social hierarchies, and institutional responses in postcolonial contexts. This theoretical lens allows for criticism of liberal humanitarian approaches that portray reintegration as a route of reparation and restoration of women returnees from LRA, to regular social, and domestic roles, foregrounding political possibility of rupture and fracture as a productive spaces for emancipatory agency. As opposed to advocating for mere inclusion within pre-existing structures, reimagining political belonging on significantly distinctive terms, one that foregrounds subaltern subjectivities, insurgent knowledges, and alternative modes of being and becoming. Methodologically, the paper utilises a qualitative, interpretative approach, drawing from carefully curated life histories, narrative interviews, and existing ethnographic studies of LRA women returnees, which privileges women’s independent articulations of identity, and belonging as an epistemic intervention that challenges externally imposed reintegration logics. While, focusing on their own articulations of identity, and belonging, foregrounding the everyday politics through which they navigate their post-war lives in ways that contest dominant reintegration paradigms, while negotiating marginalisation and reclaiming agency.