Gulu Study and Service Abroad Program (GSSAP): Access to Justice in Lalogi & Lakwana Sub Counties

This post is a bit overdue. I’ll loss it up to “Ugandan time” and a perpetually dead laptop battery. A semester ago I remember Dr. Rox & Trish reiterating during the GSSAP interview that the service-learning oriented internship portion often confirms for students if they are able to work in his or her chosen environment.

As for the past few weeks, I have spent most of my internship period in the Lalogi and Lakwana sub-counties with the Centre for Rehabilitation & Reconciliation attempting wrap my head around the land wrangle crisis gripping Northern Uganda. Each day in the field has brought a constant barrage of emotion, sense, and confusion. As an undergraduate student I struggle to understand the cross-bred issues of internal displacement, accessing cultural bound notions of justice, the LRA conflict, and the neoliberal world order that are all in someway wrapped in each land wrangle in Northern Uganda.

My time at CRR has been spent asking questions and listening. But mostly listening as people narrate individual lived experiences. My attraction to anthropology is the discipline’s unique ability to capture people’s individual stories and arrange them into a wider focus that critically engages the social, cultural, and economic realities around them. A shared component between law and anthropology is a mutual understanding that the individual narrative can transform justice in the face of convoluted legacies of prolonged conflict and internal displacement.

I hope some of these images partially illustrate the past few weeks academically and otherwise.

Community sensitization explaining the process to procure
a certificate of customary ownership. An overwhelming majority of
attendees were women in Lakwana SC.