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Paper short abstract

Northern Uganda has been subject to prolonged humanitarian and development aid interventions for nearly three decades. This paper raises questions of what it means to do research in a social and physical landscape marked by aid projects.

Paper long abstract

Northern Uganda during the LRA war and the subsequent reconstruction processes presents a case in which suffering was commodified through the proliferation of donor money, media attention, and government instrumentalization of aid. This aid marketplace led to local moral and financial economies driven by ‘selling stories’ – particularly trauma-laden narratives of bush war survivors – for consumption by NGOs, donors, and researchers. Reconstruction mobilized new and diverse stakeholders in search of funding for projects to ‘rehabilitate’ both individuals and society. The legacies of this aid marketplace now structure life for many inhabitants of northern Uganda.

Based on our experiences navigating interlocutors’ expectations, positionalities and narratives of NGO and research intervention, the projectocracy lens highlights the way the structure of ‘the project’ underpins challenges of researching and living in Northern Uganda after the LRA conflict. We focus on the life experiences of, and our own interactions with, one individual, Otim, as an entry point to illustrate the way project-thinking structures research and navigation in Gulu and the gap between ‘project promises and lived realities’. Otim exemplifies one form of the projectariat, as someone who navigated project-structured aid responses coming ‘out of the bush’ and has since positioned himself as a broker between LRA returnees and the NGOs, academics, donors, and government officials who constitute a significant part of the resource landscape in Gulu. Our interactions with Otim, both individually and together, illustrate not only his navigation of projectocracy but broader structural forces and precarity shaping our own positions and research frameworks.