Legitimation Crisis: Youth in Northern Uganda in the 2000s Amrit Trewn.

December 6, 2011 I In Uganda, a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding over the past twenty years. The North, particularly the Acholi ethnic group, has been systematically and economically discriminated against: Under the British colonial system, the practice of ethnic division was imposed in Uganda, as a result of which the peoples of the north came to dominate the ranks of the colonial army while generally being economically and politically disadvantaged (Dunn 2007:139). Because President Museveni is from the Southwest, he does not care for the North and negatively links the North with Ida Amin. Around 1987, Joseph Kony started his Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and began guerrilla activity to overthrow Museveni and form a government based on the Ten Commandments and local Acholi tradition. The North has been declared a military zone by Museveni, as a war has been fought there between the LRA and Musevenis National Resistance Army (NRA) for nearly 25 years. LRA tactics include capturing civilians and creating non-voluntary military forces. Young men and women provided Konys LRA with combatants as well as domestic and sexual servants. Farmlands in Acholiland have been abused. Vast numbers of refugees from Gulu town, in Acholi territories, moved into Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. Children would walk at night to Gulu town out of fear of being abducted and raped in villages and IDP camps during rural night raids. This population will be the focus of my case study. To further my exploration of this case, I must first examine important theoretical concepts that contribute to my framework, the lens through which I will analyze this crisis. In The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts, Weber defines his notion of a

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legitimate order to be the consequence of the validity of social action: Action, especially social action which involves a social relationship, may be guided by the belief in the existence of a legitimate order. The probability that action will actually be so governed will be called the validity (Geltung) of the order in question (Weber 1978:31). While [a]n order can roughly be defined as prescriptions for how to act that have acquired a certain independence in the minds of individual actors, we can define social structure to be the result of political and social orders. However, actors tend to act according to these orders only if they have validity. In this sense, actors influence the construction of a social structure as they exercise their agency by reinforcing or disobeying certain orders as a reflection of their political or social legitimacy. Throughout this paper I will examine how the LRA and hiding youth act as separate organizations questioning the legitimacy of certain orders. Furthermore, I will explore the legitimation crisis the hiding youth faced due to the LRA. II A central theme in this course has been the relationship between structure and agency. Here, I will expand on this relationship by tying in crucial, theoretical concepts, such as legitimacy and the emblematic function of signs. In Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Weber offers a nuanced understanding of legitimacy as it acts as a conceptual bridge between agency and structure: Weber argues that an order is considered valid only if there is a probability that actions complying with it will be guided by a belief in its legitimacy (Weber 1978:285). He further develops the significance of legitimacy in his discussion of legitimate order and explains that a persons actions are partially determined by the validity of an order, which he fulfills partly because disobedience would be disadvantageous to him but also because its violation would be abhorrent to his sense of duty (Weber 1978:31).

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The most stable order is one which enjoys the prestige of being considered binding, or, as it may be expressed, of legitimacy (Weber 1978:31). Thus, if we consider agency to be how peoples actions influence, and are influenced by, larger social and political structures, we discover that agency is exercised in terms of legitimate orders (Ahearn 2001:7). Moreover, even in the case of evasion or disobedience, action can be oriented to an order without conformity as the probability of their being recognized as valid norms may have an effect on action (Weber 1978:32). In their effort to lead meaningful lives, actors navigate the social structure tactfully, commenting on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of particular orders. Political legitimacy can be further divided into three subtypes: legal, traditional, and charismatic legitimacy: In legal domination, legitimacy rests on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commandsTraditional domination rests on an established belief in the sanctity or immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under themAnd charismatic domination rests on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patters or order revealed by him. (Weber 1978:149) The theoretical concept of domination is central to our understanding of different types of political legitimacy, where domination is defined as the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons (Weber 1978:64). III. Legitimacy refers to a code of meaning about authority. To understand how this code works in social practice, concepts from semiotic theory are useful for understanding how meaning mediates social relations. One key semiotic concept is social index, which refers to

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some detail or mark that has contextual meaning. Agha explains social indexicality to be the following: the contextual features indexed by speech and accompanying signs that are understood as attributes of, or relationships between, social persons (Agha 2007:14). Reflexive social practices are forms of activities often practiced by human beings when one communicates signs in order to communicate about another sign (Agha 2007: 16-17). Understanding the reflexive relationships of a society is crucial to understanding the social relations of any given culture (Agha 2007: 16-17). For example, while waving one's right hand back and forth as a guest leaves is a way to say goodbye, by waving with his right hand instead of his left may be a form of respect and endearment in a culture, and may be reflexively commented on. In order to understand social identity as indexical, it is important to be reflexive, look back on indexicality, make inferences from indexical signs in their context, and pre-conceptualize the reflexivity of another personan entirely recursive process (Agha 2007:27). To understand indexicality and reflexivity helps one understand how actors comment on the legitimacy and validity of political and social orders. To illustrate the relationship between legitimacy and semiotic activities, consider an example from Child Soldiers: Sierra Leones Revolutionary United Front, which presents cases that highlight the significance of legitimacy, emblems, and reflexivity to the social dynamics and methods of the RUF. The author provides the following anecdote of a child soldier: I recruited other childrenAfter we attacked a village, I would go into the houses and talk with the children. I would tell them that the RUF was great and I would tell them about the movement. I told them that they were in real danger if they didnt joinI was very successful and I would come back with many children. (Boy) (Denov 2010:105)

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The patrimonialism of the RUF grew out of charismatic domination and patriarchalism, which we can understand by using Webers theory of legitimacy. In this scenario, youth clientalism and patronage manifest on different levels. First, the young boy would follow his orders to attack a village, suggesting that he is a client to some higher patron. Consequently, he validates the political legitimacy of his patron and, more generally, the political order of the RUF. Then, by telling the children of the attacked villages that the RUF was great and if they did not join that they would be in danger, the young client was acting as a patron. Essentially, he offered protection to the other children on behalf of the RUF if they joined. Moreover, by collecting many children, this young boy likely moved up on the social hierarchy of the RUF and was given control over younger children. Thus, he also acted as a patron protecting his clients given that they follow his commands and buy into his political and, more specifically, his legal legitimacy. The child soldier acted reflexively, as he took note of the emblematic signs of his victims and declared them as youth. With this understanding, the child soldier exercised agency as he reflexively considered how, through recruitment, he could use his victims to improve his value and increase his safety among the RUF. IV The remainder of my paper will focus on a case study by analyzing the practice of youth hiding in northern Uganda during the early and mid 2000s, and the legitimation crises they faced in light of LRA terrorism. As a synopsis of Habermass Legitimation Crisis, in his handout titled Legitimacy and Legitimation Crisis, Murphy succinctly writes that a legitimation crisis refers to the loss of acceptance and validity of the normative structures that regulate the social order of conventions and customs, the political order of authority and community governance, and the economic order of production and distribution of goods and services. Central to a

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legitimation crisis is the vulnerability of the subjects: We therefore associate with crises the idea of an objective force that deprives the subject of some part of his normal sovereignty (Habermas 1973:105). During the early and mid 2000s, at the height of LRA child abduction, the youth in northern Uganda faced a legitimation crisis as the institutions of family, community, and government could no longer protect them from the wide-spread yet unpredictable LRA abduction and terrorism, and consequently lost validity in the eyes of the youth. The definition of youth changes contextually in relation to fields of power, knowledge, rights, notions of agency and personhood (Durham 2000:117). Youth are constantly considering what kinds of power are available and where they can be exercised, and by whom, and the answers to these questions differ depending on the context, relationships, and larger organizational, institutional, and social structures. Furthermore, Durham points out that [y]outh enter political space as saboteursas political actors whose politics is to open up discourses on the nature of society in its broadest and most specific terms (Durham 2000:118). In Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lords Resistance Army, Allen shows how youth in northern Uganda altered their lifestyles and the meaning of youth in response to LRA terrorism: To avoid abduction, thousands of young people commute to the bigger towns or to the centre of the camps in the evening, sleeping in schools and dispensaries, on the verandas of shops or at the Catholic missions. For young women, in particular, this has sometimes exposed them to abuseOn 1 April 2004, a survey of eleven night commuter sites in Gulu town found almost 20,000 children. (Allen 2006:55) Why were youth choosing to commute daily from their villages and IDP camps to town? What structural changes contributed to the shifting of youth to being defined by fear of abduction in

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northern Uganda? Exploring these questions will aid my discussion of the legitimation crisis faced by these youth. Contrary to popular discussions of youth in impoverished settings as pre-social and passive recipients of experience, youths marginality, liminality, and ability to mediate, positively or negatively, between the manifold oppositions, ruptures and contradictionplaces them squarely in the centre and generates tremendous power (De Boeck 2005: 3,10). This understanding of youth as mobilized suggests that they perform agency. Because they are inevitably shaped by society, youth is a shifter identity. By performing their desire of youth as independent enables youth to express contextual, tactical agency. Their creativity and performativity of social identity give youth agency. In a recursive fashion, youth innovatively work within their constraints to gain agency and influence the social structures which shaped them in the first place (Diouf 2005:229). Moreover, youth exercise agency as a tool which allows them to re-conceptualize old meanings and construct new meanings in the social structure as a consequence of changes in legitimacy of structures surrounding them. The documentary Invisible Children follows the lives of hiding youth in northern Africa in the early 2000s, and suggests that these youth faced a legitimation crisis because they no longer felt safe and protected by their family, community, or government. Therefore, the validity of these normative institutional structures was lost due to the youth fearing abduction by the LRA. Nevertheless, in response to this legitimation crisis, northern Ugandan youth exercised agency by banding together in groups, commuting to Gulu town at night, and hiding from the LRA. The first group of youth in hiding documented in Invisible Children commute to the Lacor hospital every evening, under which they sleep in a tight area that floods a few times a week (Russell 2006). Watching this group interact is astonishing because not only do they sleep

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together, but they eat together, do their homework together, wash off together, commute together and, more generally, look after each other: But we realized these kids were more than mere friend, they became a family (Russell 2006). In structural terminology, this group of youth represented an organization and the members exercised collective agency by hiding at night as a means to navigate the social structures horribly influenced by the LRA, which acted as a terrorist organizational structure. Dan Kidega, a member of the parliament who speaks on the behalf of the children, stated that the message from the children is very clear: survival, peace (Russell 2006). While organizations with legitimacy are more stable, the LRA rely heavily on terrorism techniques in order to forcibly alter the social structure in which youth try to navigate their lives. Kony specifically targets youth between the ages five and twelve because they are big enough to carry guns but small enough to sneak into schools to steal more children. Once in the jungle, Joseph immediately desensitizes them through violent indoctrination. Because of this, each night they hide from him and his child soldiers (Russell 2006). When the abductees escape or are released, they return to their villages or the IDP camps and reflexively share their horrific stories of abduction and life with the LRA, shocking the local youth into fear of abduction. One escapee living in hiding shared her story about how she was forced to kill her mother in order to live and was forced to live in the bush (Allen 2006:67). As a terror technique, she explains, Later a stone was burnt into ashes with oil moo yaa and smeared on to our bodies. Also water was sprinkled on us. Then Kony said from that time we are his soldiersThey smeared us in this wayalso to stop us escaping. We were told that if we escaped, the holy spirit [tipu maleng] would bring us backI believed it (Allen 2006:68). This abducted girl affirms her perception of the political

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legitimacy of the LRA as valid because she fears the traditional domination of the holy spirit and fearfully respects the legitimacy of the LRA. Allen forces us to further nuance our understanding of the LRAs use of abduction as a terrorism technique, and exposes how the LRA used terrorism techniques to establish and cultivate belief in its political legitimacy. Allen writes, The point is that the abduction of children has been a deliberate strategy a weapon of choice. Like rape, it has been used systematically and selectively to terrorize the populationReleasing some children and adult soon after their capture is part of this process. Their stories are meant to instill respect and fear, by demonstrating that returning home, like mutilation and death, is at the whim of a commander. The very unpredictability of what can happen after capture is part of what makes it so alarming. (Allen 2006:64) Why does the LRA, a northern political movement that claims to support the concerns of the North, terrorize the youth in the North who would eventually be the leaders of the Acholi ethnic group? By capturing youth for their organizational projects, the LRA use abduction and terrorism to scare the youthful population of the North into validating them as a legitimate mass movement against an oppressive government neglecting the interests of the North. In this way, the LRA uses youth members to increase the validity of their organization and their political legitimacy among the Acholi. These techniques of the LRA have been very effective, as proven through the daily and large-scale night commuting of youth during the early and mid 2000s. The large, overhanging question about this conflict between the LRA and Musevenis government concerns the length of it: Why has it continued for well over twenty years? While
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the LRA utilizes awful terrorism techniques for recruitment and legitimacy building, they still remain a small, extreme political faction that lacks stable, political legitimacy. Acholi youth did not feel safe in the IDP camps at night because they believed that Musevenis government lost political legitimacy in competition against the LRA. This is a reasonable conclusion by the youth, seeing as the Ugandan armed officials (UPDA) supposedly protecting them at the IDP camps often fled during night raids in a panic, and rarely defeated the rebel forces (Allen 2006:55). More poignantly, recent discoveries have shown that Musevenis government benefits from the self-perpetuating, vicious cycle of the conflict. For example, the conflict represents a larger geopolitical struggle which Museveni is heavily involved in. The Sudanese government has acted as a proxy as President al Bashir supports the LRA and vice versa, while the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) and the NRA assist each other (Dunn 2007:143). Additionally, by deeming the LRA a terrorist group, Museveni was able to take advantage of the US need for allies in the post 9/11 era, become engaged in the War on Terror and, thus, become a recipient of large amounts of aid from the US. Due to the elongation of the crisis, the political legitimacy of Musevenis government has been lost in the eyes of the disenfranchised northern Acholi. Fearful of abduction in the presence of the UPDA, the youth saw hiding as their best opportunity to navigate their lives in a social structure infiltrated by fear. Youth would commute from villages and IDP camps to Gulu town as an expression of collective agency in a social structure altered by the LRA through terrorism techniques. The institutional structure of government lost its validity in the North as it ceased to protect the northerners in IDP camps and, in general, from the conflict. Because of the forceful effectiveness of the LRAs organizational structure in transforming the social structures, the institutional structures of family and community also lost their validity in the eyes of the youth: The moral
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path has really been degraded so much that you find children moving from their places [i.e not staying with their parents]. They dont really getwhat people used to get in their communities, sitting together around the fireplace and trying to discuss and get the moral education from their parents (Allen 2006:71). While youth felt safe within their community and with their family prior to being fearful of abduction, youth in response to LRA night raids and terrorism no longer validated the legitimacy of the community and family institutions. V The youth of northern Uganda in the early and mid 2000s faced a serious legitimation crisis, as they lose trust in the family, community, and government institutions. Through use of child abduction and subsequent terrorism techniques, Konys LRA injected fear into the existing social structure. As a result of the LRAs fear-producing strategies, the institutional structures of family, community, and government lost legitimacy in the eyes of the local youth as the LRA gained legitimacy as a force to be dealt with. My argument elucidates the legitimation crisis youth faced in northern Uganda and clarifies the general research problem of understanding the complexities of structure and youth agency in Africa. Because youth have been traditionally documented as being on the margins of society in Africa following the failure of the nationalist discourse, youth have not been envisioned as actors in society. Yet, as my discussion has shown, youth are active in responding to and influencing change in structures. In the face of legitimation crises where certain normative structures have lost validity, youth in Africa respond by exercising agency, whether it occurs on the individual, collective, or organizational level. This case study shows more generally that youth in Africa should no longer

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be viewed as the passive victims of history. Rather, African youth should be conceptualized as agents that proactively respond to crises of legitimacy and actively reshape institutional life.

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References Cited Agha, Asif 2007 Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Ahearn, Laura M. 2001 Agency in Key Terms in Language and Culture. Ed. Alessandro Duranti. MA: Blackwell Publishers. Allen, Tim 2006 Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lords Resistance Army. NYC: Zed Books Ltd. De Boeck, Filip and Honwana, Alcinda 2005 Introduction: Children & Youth in Youth Agency, Identity & Place. Makers & Breakers: Children in Postcolonial Africa. Ed. Alicia Honwana & Filip De Boeck. NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Denov, Myriam 2010 Child Soldiers: Sierra Leones Revolutionary United Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diouf, Mamadou 2005 Afterword. Makers & Breakers: Children in Postcolonial Africa. Ed. Alicia Honwana and Filip De Boeck. NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Dunn, Kevin C. 2007 Uganda: The Lords Resistance Army. African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine. Ed. Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunn. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Durham, Deborah 2000 Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa: Introduction to Parts 1 and 2. Anthropological Quarterly 73 (3):113-120. Haberman, Juren 1973 Legitimation Crisis. Thomas McCarthy, translator. Boston: Beacon Press. Murphy, William P. 2003 Military Patrimonialism and Child Soldier Clientalism in the Liberian and Sierra Leonean Civil Wars. African Studies Review 46 (2):61-87. Russell, Jason [Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole] 2006 Invisible Children [videorecording, 55 min.]. Weber, Max 1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. LA, CA: University of California Press.

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