The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa by Mareike Schomerus (review)

The Lord’s Resistance Army (lra) was and remains an enigmatic rebel group. Officially defeated and driven out of northern Uganda since about 2008, following failed peace talks brokered by the then semiautonomous Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS, before it became South Sudan), the lra and its long surviving commander Joseph Kony have remained at large in 2022. No longer in Uganda and posing almost no direct security threat, the lra nonetheless quickly assumed a regional presence, straddling South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic.

The GoSS Vice-President, Riek Machar, initiated and spearheaded the peace negotiations, dubbed “Juba Talks,” conducted intermittently between 2006 and 2008. These peace talks were not the first between the lra and the government of Uganda, but they were certainly the most promising and protracted, at least on paper and in form. Despite the power struggles and squabbles between the participants, and the cleavages between the rebels and their ostensibly chosen delegation of negotiators, a series of preliminary and ground-setting agreements emerged, setting the stage for the rebels to move from Uganda and other locations in South Sudan to two designated assembly points.

In the end, however, the Final Peace Agreement (fpa) never materialized; Kony snubbed several entreaties that he sign the agreement. Kony and four of his top commanders viewed their indictment by the International Criminal Court (icc) as a hindrance to negotiated peace. During the talks, the government of Uganda and its international allies, especially the United States, reserved the option of returning to a military solution. As the push to sign the fpa persisted, the lra continued to show its mistrust of the government of Uganda and its international allies, including the icc. The talks ended when the lra left designated assembly points and retreated into the Garamba forest of the DRC, and the Uganda military launched Operation Lightning Thunder, a series of airstrikes and ground offensives, against it.

Did this development mean that the Juba Talks had failed? Why did Kony refuse to sign the fpa? How did the Juba Talks demonstrate the disjuncture between peace building as a technocratic exercise and the actual political processes and experiences around negotiations? How does a rebel group’s internal organization shape its approach to, and perception of, peace talks? Schomerus addresses these questions (and others) meticulously via a rare collection of original field material and firsthand information, combining theoretical rigor with empirical observation. The result is a comprehensive and compelling portrait of the Juba Talks carrying implications for peace building in Africa and elsewhere. Schomerus had unusual access not just to the deliberations in Juba, but also to lra rebels in the “bush.” The book draws from conversations with rebel fighters and fascinating encounters with the two top commanders, Kony and Vincent Otti, Kony’s then number two. The negotiations were still ongoing when Kony reportedly killed Otti, the face of the LRA during the talks. Otti had made the rebel group known to the world through interviews and statements, including interactions with Schomerus.

Schomerus shows that the lra’s internal fragmentation, the mistrust between the parties to the talks—borne of past experiences as well as Uganda’s checkered political history—and conflicting individual interests may have doomed the peace process from start. Yet the Juba Talks contributed to pacifying northern Uganda. At one point, the humanitarian crisis there was the worst in the world—masses of people condemned to an appalling life in internally displaced-peoples’ camps. The Ugandan military through Operation Iron Fist (ois) in the early 2000s uprooted the lra from their bases inside Southern Sudan, prompting the rebels to move into northern Uganda where they visited enormous brutality on locals. When militarily cornered, the lra often responded with mass abductions and killings of civilians. By the time of the Juba Talks, the LRA had been strategically weakened, in part due to ois, but northern Uganda had suffered...