Feminised Citizenship in Practice: The Disciplinary Politics of LRA Women’s Post-Conflict Return

This paper examines the post conflict return of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) women in Northern Uganda through the lens of normative feminised citizenship, foregrounding how reintegration framework operate less as mechanisms of restoration than as instruments of moral, social and political control. Anchoring the paper on Feminist Citizenship theory, I argue that normative feminised citizenship operates as a disciplinary system in post conflict contexts, in which women returnee’s political belonging is restored not through rights, but through moral rehabilitation, gender conformity, and social surveillance, rendering citizenship conditional, embodied, and marginal (Tripp, A. M, 2006; Yuval-Davis, N, 2011; Tamale, S, 2020). As opposed to addressing the violence endured by the LRA women returnee during abduction, forced militarisation, or sexual exploitation; Community, humanitarian and state structures construct the LRA women returnee as tainted perpetrators of violence, collapsing their complex historical and social subjectivities into narrow moral binaries that dictate acceptable forms of reintegration. This framing enforces compliance with normative femininity, moral expectation, and social conformity, rendering the women’s political agency and fractured identities invisible. By historicising return and situating it within the afterlife of the LRA conflict, the paper uncovers how post-conflict governance produces conditional, gendered citizenship characterised by a normative feminised form of belonging, that privileges moral performance over substantive political recognition. The paper challenges celebratory narratives of reintegration, demonstrating how reintegration operates deceptively; simultaneously appear to restore social order, while reinscribing exclusion, surveillance, and structural abandonment. Methodologically, the paper draws on carefully selected secondary empirical materials from qualitative studies on the LRA women returnee, including life histories, narratives, and interpretive interviews, positioning the women’s experiences as a counter narrative to dominant post-conflict imaginaries, foregrounding a decolonial framework for comprehending the intersections of gender, violence, and citizenship in post conflict context, particularly, Acholi region, Northern Uganda. References Tamale, S. (2020). Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press. Tripp, A. M. (2006). Uganda: The Politics of Women’s Rights. In African Women’s Movements (pp. 67–97). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage.