Broken Bones, Buried Bullets, and Honest Money: Peacemaking, Innovation, and History in Karamoja, Uganda

What the paper says

A focus on indigenous mechanisms of conflict resolution and reconciliation has influenced many international peacebuilding and transitional justice interventions since the turn of the twenty-first century. Scholarly analyses and policy proposals concerning indigenous peacebuilding, however, tend to reproduce two-dimensional images of fossilized tradition, rather than reckoning with ongoing processes of adaptation and creativity. This article offers a longue durée analysis of changing modes of peacemaking among the Jie agropastoralists of the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda, focusing on particular ‘peacemaking technologies’ that Jie people innovated and adopted over time. I conceive of peacemaking technologies not only as particular materials or rituals employed in processes of conflict resolution, but as ‘technologies-in-use’, which derive their meaning and efficacy from changing political, economic, and sociocultural realities. Each of these peacemaking technologies thus offers a window into moments of change and innovation in Jie history. In tracing the history of peacemaking in Karamoja, I urge scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding to treat indigenous forms of peacemaking as nuanced processes of adaptation rather than timeless, immutable traditions, and to engage with the context-specific understandings of peace that gave rise to these mechanisms of conflict resolution. Doing so reveals neither the collapse of indigenous systems of conflict resolution nor their failure to adapt to the demands of twenty-first-century life, but a process of adaptation, rooted in both indigenous ethics and pragmatic economic calculus.