The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality ed. by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot (review)

The March 2012 release of the online video titled Kony 2012 by the American advocacy group that calls itself Invisible Children brought global attention to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group. Critics of Invisible Children were quick to point out the film’s many shortcomings, including its oversimplification of a complex crisis, the implicit suggestion that there is still active warfare in northern Uganda, and a noticeable lack of African voices in a film ostensibly made to help them. Kony 2012 also overstated the LRA’s current force strength and capacities; far from being the “world’s worst warlord,” as the film called him, Joseph Kony and his forces are significantly smaller and less powerful than they were a decade ago. Moreover, the film’s proposed solution to the LRA crisis—hunting down Kony and either killing him or bringing him before an international court—ignored the fact that previous efforts in this vein have repeatedly failed and even resulted in retaliation against civilians.

Global interest in the LRA crisis is at a peak, even as misinformation about the organization, its capacities, and what it would take to destroy the LRA proliferates. This makes the contributions of the authors in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality quite timely. The contributors provide important counterpoints to many popular misconceptions about the movement based on extensive fieldwork and novel research methods. Understanding the logic of Kony’s approach is a key theme of the book and one that those working in the region will find of great interest. Far from being irrational, Kony and the LRA have specific political grievances against the government that are broadly shared in the Acholi population of northern Uganda. Adam Branch shows that the LRA insurgency cannot rightly be understood apart from the broader history of Ugandan ethnic identity politics and from internal political crises in Acholi society. This theme runs throughout the book’s chapters; the LRA is not simply an army of anarchist, lunatic “bad guys,” but is rather a complex movement with political, economic, and spiritual dimensions. Reflecting on her interview of Joseph Kony, Mareike Schomerus observes, “the LRA’s understanding of trust and betrayal, of accountability and culpability, of right and wrong is complex, but not simply unreasonable. Kony denied the atrocities, but what else would anyone expect?” (111). Kristof Titeca furthers this point, showing that spirituality in the LRA serves strategic interests as a mechanism for keeping the movement unified and disciplined.

Other excellent and useful contributions come from authors attempting to make sense of efforts to make peace with Kony or bring him to justice, as well as to implement reconciliation and transitional justice programs. Of particular value is the perspective of Ronald Iya, a traditional Madi leader who notes that most in his community believe Kony’s crimes are too extensive and serious to be handled through traditional justice mechanisms. Sandrine Perrot notes that efforts to address the crisis were undermined by its having been framed as a local, primarily humanitarian crisis rather than as part of a broad international and regional set of conflicts. As Branch notes, the only viable long-term solution to the crisis in Acholiland must integrate and institutionalize broad participation in Ugandan political life and discourses.

Many of the contributors’ findings challenge conventional wisdom on the experiences of child soldiers and transitional justice processes. Ben Mergelsberg demonstrates from his interviews with former abducted child soldiers that the LRA’s members are not simply passive victims. Indeed, he finds that former child soldiers are “active survivors with a good sense of who they were fighting, how they survived and what they needed most after their return from the LRA” (157). Likewise, Christopher Blattman and Jeannie Annan find that the LRA’s targeting of child soldiers is far from random, but is rather part of a...