Gender and forum shopping in land conflict resolution in Northern Uganda

Abstract

Northern Uganda has been plagued by a long and violent civil war that lasted from 1996 to 2006, during which 2.5 million people were internally displaced and placed in camps. During the conflict, Uganda adopted a new constitution and a new land act that recognised customary land tenure and the role played by customary institutions in resolving land disputes. Following the cessation of hostilities in 2006, people began to go back "home", and many land conflicts ensued. Because women are generally considered as particularly vulnerable in land conflicts, they have received much attention from the Ugandan government, international donors, and NGOs. This article focuses on how women make use of the existing legal pluralism in Uganda to defend their interests in land disputes. It argues that land conflicts are often proxies of social conflicts, which play a major role in women's opting for customary institutions to resolve their land conflicts.

The ‘marketplace of post‐conflict assistance’ in northern Uganda and beyond

“…Such a metaphor has previously been applied by scholars to analyse, inter alia, marketplaces of politics and peacekeeping (de Waal, 2009), humanitarian aid and development (Willner-Reid, 2018), and spirituality (Bowman, 1999). Previous studies similarly attested systems of legal (Anying andGausset, 2017), medical (Bowman, 1999), and spiritual pluralisms (Gammelin, 2018)-all of which are characteristic of marketplace dynamics, as we tease out below. Many of these pre-existing analyses, though, operate in silos, concentrating on specific aspects, such as the aid marketplace of national and international humanitarian organisations in Afghanistan (Willner-Reid, 2018) or the marketisation of healing and health in Africa (Dekker and van Dijk, 2010).…”

“…In this marketplace of post‐conflict assistance, ‘clients’ in search of services, help, or healing ‘shop around', looking for different possibilities at different points in time, and comparing what different actors have to offer in response to their respective place‐ and time‐contingent needs, means, resources, and priorities. Individuals and communities choose between different services and institutions, often ‘moving from one healing option to another’ (Gammelin, 2018, p. 245), ‘according to the constraints they face and the outcome they hope to achieve in different arenas’ (Anying and Gausset, 2017, p. 354). The different sets of actors—NGOs, religions institutions, state agencies, and traditional authorities—thus serve as ‘entrepreneurs’ (Madlingozi, 2010), supplying services, and the affected communities are the metaphorical ‘clients', who ‘shop around’ for services in response to their needs and experiences, in search of healing and assistance to address their harms.…”

“…Lastly, and as we elaborate in the discussion section, the abilities and capacities of individuals to shop around the marketplace of assistance are also heavily governed by structural factors and specifically by socioeconomic resources: just like in an actual marketplace, not all individuals in search of healing and assistance have the means and resources to sample all of the options on offer. As Anying and Gausset (2017, p. 354) discuss in relation to the notion of ‘forum shopping’ in contexts of legal plurality, ‘the choice of one forum is not only made according to preferences for certain … principles, but can also depend on … differences such as physical and financial accessibility and impartiality, or cultural preferences'. In northern Uganda, for instance, traditional rituals or biomedicine come at a cost that not everyone can afford (see below).…”

The Role of Communication as Agrarian Conflicts Resolution (Systematic Literature Review

“…However, advocacy tends to be carried out massively confrontationally (Alfitri et al, 2017) because the basis is law. Mediation is carried out by involving local actors to influence policy (Anying & Gausset, 2017), the role of traditional elders (John et al, 2018),and the involvement of the government and traditional institutions (Erwin et al, 2019) in deliberations (Kurniati et al, 2019) to find the best solution that is acceptable to all parties and mutually beneficial. Based on these studies, a concrete form of mediation is to present a mediator.…”

Women’s Land Rights in Uganda. Securing Women’s Resource Rights through Gender Transformative Approaches

“…Source: Nakirunda, 2011;Obaikol, 2014;Anying and Gausset, 2017;Djurfeldt, 2020;Sabiiti, 2019 Traditional leaders, usually men, define the rules and mechanisms for accessing land based on the land's customary practices, religion and social norms.…”