Portrait of a Failed Rebellion

Lucy Hovil and Eric Werker
Additional contact information
Lucy Hovil: Faculty of Law at Makerere University, Uganda, research@refugeelawproject.org
Eric Werker: Harvard University, werker@post.harvard.edu

Rationality and Society, 2005, vol. 17, issue 1, 5-34

Abstract: While newspaper reports typically describe anti-civilian violence in civil war as resulting from hatred or anarchy, there is an emerging literature that interprets these processes as calculated, strategic actions of war makers. We argue that this literature overestimates the strategic value of violence by focusing on conflicts where this strategy is used deliberately and on a massive scale. Our analysis examines the violence in a failed, peripheral rebellion in western Uganda and finds that the brutality was premeditated; however, the gains to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels were not military. Instead, we argue that anti-civilian violence in western Uganda stems from the financier-insurgent relationship that promoted a high level of violence in response to divergent interests, unequal access to information, and contracting limitations. In other words, civilians were victimized in order that the ADF could keep their outside funding.

Keywords: anti-civilian violence; civil war; insurgency; Uganda; war financing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463105051775 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:17:y:2005:i:1:p:5-34

DOI: 10.1177/1043463105051775

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().