Paper short abstract:

The Karamojong crisis is most extreme for women. Patriarchy is intensifying, eroding women’s few rights. Their access to justice is restricted to traditional courts which offer no protection, yet women’s awareness of their situation seems to be changing. We ask if this signals future social change.

Paper long abstract:

While the Karamojong pastoralists of north-east Uganda are experiencing severe insecurity following the loss of most of their cattle as a consequence of a misconceived and uneven disarmament process that started in 2006, women are experiencing an even greater crisis than men. Not only external threats have increased, but also threats from within their communities, where social structures appear to have become more oppressive and less responsive to the needs of women. Pastoralist societies are typically patriarchal, but little has been written on how women experience this, and what this might presage in terms of the social changes being promoted by development actors. The army is the principle manifestation of the state in a region that has been marginalised from the colonial period onwards, and the formal justice law and order sector offers negligible security to the population. Community-level justice delivered by local council courts is subordinate to customary justice handed down by elders, which confirms men's property rights over and in relation to women. Representation on local councils has raised women's awareness of their vulnerability and subjugation; but also generated hope of at least being able to control the household goods they generate and of protection from more extreme domestic and intra-community violence. We examine women's responses to this situation, asking whether momentum for change in gender relations is being generated, or whether more oppressive patriarchy, and women's dissatisfaction and resistance to it, are a recurrent feature of the crises that have repeatedly afflicted Karamoja.