In recent years, there has been a ‘crackdown’ against environmental defenders across Uganda. Journalists, students, farmers, and rural dwellers are defending the natural environment, protesting and mobilizing against unfair treatment and forced displacements brought by fossil fuel infrastructures, agribusiness, hydropower, or carbon offsetting. This has pitted authorities and large-scale capital against environmental defenders who are seeking to protect the natural environment against profit-driven corporations that seek to expand the resource extraction frontier into new geographical areas. In this context, and fifteen years after the end of the armed conflict in Northern Uganda, we question whether peace can be sustainable in this region of the country.
To fully comprehend current disputes over land or the defence of the natural environment, it is necessary to observe how nature is integrated into peacebuilding and development policies. This is because there is often a narrow understanding on how local communities integrate the natural environment in their everyday life. Three issues stand out in relation to the contributions nature can make to foster sustainable peace and development in Northern Uganda beyond its role in income generation by resource exploitation. The natural environment is relevant for peace because it works as a (a) semiotic system, (b) public space, and (c) reconciliation means.
Nature as semiotic system
In Northern Uganda, once people left internal displaced camps and returned home after the war, evidence shows that tensions amongst families and clans arose due to decreasing access to land. One of the reasons for this relates to transformations in the natural environment, as the features in the landscape that used to serve as markers for territorial formations were removed.
The natural environment functions as a semiotic system, where elements like rivers, hills, and trees carry significant meanings for local communities. These features guide people in navigating their surroundings and staking claims to ownership. For instance, a mango tree at a crossroad or a stone by a pond may serve as markers to find one’s way home. In the absence of formal demarcation systems, customary tenure becomes crucial, and maintaining peace between families and communities often relying on these symbolic landscape markers.
Nature as a public space
In Uganda, trees in villages are important spaces for reunions. They provide shelter from the sun, people stay under their shade to cool down, to chat, to play, to read, to teach or study, and to discuss the future of the local community. Some tree species are even deemed sacred, and some, due to their size, shape, or location, are worshipped (such as the Nakayima tree in central Uganda).
Public space under a tree might serve as an arena for political participation, empowerment, social cohesion, and for community healing and reconciliation. For ecological and political reasons, ‘nature’ in villages and urban areas is highly relevant, as shown by the work currently done by environmental organisations in Northern Uganda.
Nature as a means for reconciliation
The Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation signed in 2007 by the Government of Uganda and the Lord Resistance Army specified traditional rituals performed by local ethnic groups “to reconcile parties formally in conflict, after full accountability”. Mato Oput is one of such rituals: a reconciliation ceremony that takes place after someone is killed from a friendly clan. The name refers to the drinking of oput, a bitter drink prepared with smashed roots of the Oput tree and drunk at the pick of the ceremony. For some, “there is perhaps no single tree more vital in the great work of healing from the brutal civil war that has raged throughout Acholiland for over twenty years.”
For the performance of this ceremony, which is the culmination of a long process of mediation, parts of the Oput trees and other natural elements are needed. The natural environment is necessary for local accountability and reconciliation, for healing and sustaining peace. Environmental defenders and cultural leaders are currently concerned about the alarming rate of logging of oput trees in Northern Uganda.
Environmental defenders as peacebuilders
A narrow understanding and utilisation of nature that restricts people’s possibilities to relate to each other and their environment might exacerbate conflicts, either by marginalising certain knowledge or destroying the material base for peoples’ socio-ecological relationships.
Therefore, there is an urgency to revise what valorisations of nature are integrated into current peacebuilding and development policies in Uganda, and to support environmental defenders who are advocating for the inclusion of local understandings of nature in development strategies.
Maria Andrea Nardi
Maria Andrea Nardi is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Human Geography at Lund University (Sweden). Her research focuses on environmental change and territorial transformations in rural areas of the Global South. Her studies in environmental and development geography pay attention to conflictive dynamics between economic globalization, internal armed conflicts, unequal geographies of development and local livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and more recently, the Middle East.
