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Paper short abstract:

The paper wants to analyze how the DRC, as a culturally and politically foreign actor towards the LRA, interpreted the movement and tried to adapt it to its own objectives at the regional, national and local level.

Paper long abstract:

The move of the LRA, as a typically Acholi-rooted mystic-military movement, from Uganda to the DRC, put it into a totally different context with very few attachments to its area of origin. It put the movement from a highly publicized Anglophone context into Francophone surroundings with little LRA media coverage and hence knowledge. The fracture between the two linguistic areas is pervasive and exists at the level of the governments as well as at the level of the local authorities and what one can call civil society. The gap was of course deepened by a decade of war. A very limited form of bridging this gap is offered by the Zande cultural links throughout the region. The paper tries to explore how the DRC authorities and the population dealt with the LRA, at the level of the local LRA attacks, at the level of the territorial and district authorities, and at the level of the national government. At the level of the latter, the political and military dynamics between the DRC and Uganda clearly are the most determining factor, the LRA being no more than an excuse for playing out the conflict. This evolution will be contrasted with efforts from the African Union to bring all sides together in a regional initiative that got stuck in the lack of prioritization of the LRA issue by all actors involved.