Why, when almost every concerned party says they wish it would end, does a situation of suffering such as that in northern Uganda continue and indeed worsen? When I first went to northern Uganda in 1998 it was already a pertinent question; by 2006, with ninety per cent of the population internally displaced or in exile, further thousands raped, killed or forcibly abducted, and the economy in tatters, it was still more so. Even as the two ostensible parties to the conflict, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GoU), stated their commitment to peace during two years of talks in the southern Sudanese town of Juba (2006–2008), the question and its answer remained fundamentally important. For the legacy of two decades of violence and violation in northern Uganda is well beyond the scope of any peace deal, not least because many of the actors are not even visible in the talks. Insofar as the situation in northern Uganda exemplifies the ‘new wars’ of the post-cold war era, the question and its answer should also have resonance in a number of other situations whose persistence taxes both the intellect and the imagination.

      Contrary to popular presentations of the situation as being primarily an internal war between the LRA and the Government of Uganda, this book makes the case that it is instead a form of mass torture, whose principal victims are the population within the ‘war zone’, and whose ultimate function is the subordinate inclusion of the population in northern Uganda. The so-called ‘protected villages’ for the internally displaced are primary sites of this process, which I shall call Social Torture, as evidenced in widespread violation, dread, disorientation, dependency, debilitation and humiliation, all of which are tactics and symptoms typical of torture, but perpetrated on a mass rather than individual scale.

      In this interpretation visible perpetrators include the Government and LRA, but a range of less visible actors are also involved, not least the donor governments, multi-lateral organisations, churches and NGOs. In many instances these can be regarded as complicit bystanders; like doctors in a torture situation, they appear to be there to ease the suffering of victims, but in reality they enable the process to be prolonged by keeping the victim alive for further abuse. Doing this serves a number of inter-linked economic, political and psychological functions for perpetrators and bystanders alike, and is underpinned by both psychological and discursive processes of justification, the most important of which is the idea that this situation is indeed a ‘war’ between the LRA and the Government. Furthermore, by virtue of the scale at which it operates, Social Torture becomes in several senses self-perpetuating and time-indifferent.

      In short, whereas torture is generally seen as a tactic with which to prosecute war, in this situation war is being used as the guise under which to perpetrate social torture. Once this reversal of the relationship between means and end is clear it also becomes much clearer why the situation continues: steps to end the war focused on dealing with the LRA through negotiations or military means are necessary but not enough. What is also needed are interventions which address the multiple dimensions of social torture. These include addressing political and economic inequities, governmental impunity and harmful psycho-social dynamics. As those who in principle have the most power to make these changes are implicated in the social torture themselves, the focus has to shift from the intentions of visible perpetrators to the responsibilities of a far wider range of actors.

The Mainstream Discourse of Today's Wars

      Arriving at this thesis was not a linear process. Rather it involved an iterative to- and fro- between review of academic literature, policy positions, media coverage, and field-work findings. In the course of this I came to see the literature in terms of two broad types; that which contributes to what I would characterise as the mainstream discourse of today's wars (which in turn informs the majority of policy and media coverage), and that which offers the building blocks of a counter-narrative. The mainstream discourse argues that post-Cold War conflicts are internal and bi-partisan in nature, as well as apolitical and at times irrational, and therefore posits them as detached from wider systemic dynamics at the international level.

      An example from the 1990s of this preoccupation with the internal is Ramsbotham and Woodhouse's concept of ‘International Social Conflicts’ (ISCs), situations

      which are neither inter-state conflicts…nor contained within the resources of domestic conflict management…There are many other terms for this level of conflict, most commonly ‘internal conflict’ or ‘civil war’, but these do not capture the further twin characteristics of ISCs: a) that they are rooted in relations between communal groups within state borders (the ‘social’ component) and b) that they have broken out of the domestic arena and become a crisis for the state, thereby automatically involving the wider society of states (the ‘international’ component) (1996: 87).

      The preoccupation with the internal also pervades the humanitarian sector, which objectifies such situations through terms such as ‘complex emergencies’, ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’ or even ‘complex political emergencies’ (CPEs). These are all terms which entered into humanitarian vocabulary following the creation of a safe haven with military peacekeepers in northern Iraq,¹ an event which marked a dramatic shift in the nature of UN interventions in a range of situations globally (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse 1996: 70).

      Notwithstanding references to conflicts being rooted in ‘relations between communal groups’, the mainstream discourse simply adapts ‘the Clausewitzian analysis of inter-state wars’ (Keen 2005: 2) to an intra-state context, but sustains the same basic model of two-party wars which is so deeply embedded in the field of international relations and the related practical fields of mediation and conflict resolution (see, for example, Kelman 1992, Crocker 1999, 2001). In this model third parties are only written into the picture in a responsive capacity. Even in interventions based on a social-psychological perspective ‘that sees conflict at least partly and at times predominantly as a subjective social process’ (e.g. Fisher and Keashly 1996), the assumption prevails that third parties come in solely to help the conflicting parties sort out their internal muddle and play no generative role in creating that muddle.

      The internal model of war is underpinned by two alternative explanations of what motivates the people who are visibly involved. Both of these largely exclude the possibility of political explanations. One is the substantial body of literature which regards such ‘internal’ conflicts as based on economic rationales. The perspective that simple ‘greed’ is what motivates people (more specifically, rebels), has tended to predominate, and is forcefully articulated by Collier (2000). A more nuanced economic perspective is provided by Stewart (2002), who explores the role of horizontal economic inequalities in creating a sense of grievance. Berdal and Malone (2000) argue that, although ‘the presence of economic motives and commercial agendas in wars is not so much a new phenomenon as a familiar theme’, the economic dimensions of civil conflict have not in fact been given sufficiently systematic attention; they therefore seek to explore