Paper short abstract:

This interdisciplinary study examines how the mental landscape of post-conflict recovery influences behaviour. Simply recalling the conflict changes the way people behave, but long-term effects of violence and the narratives that shape people's lives post-conflict are nuanced and multifaceted.

Paper long abstract:

Northern Ugandans have diverse opinions on the question whether their society and their lives have been rebuilt since the end of violent conflict in 2006. While life has much improved, recovery has been challenging. The war's legacy shapes everyday experience of structural and institutional issues as well as social and personal, or even psychological, concerns. Together, the presence of the war in people's minds and the structural problems they face make up what we call the 'mental landscape of post-conflict recovery.'

This paper helps our understanding of how this mental landscape influences individual behaviour. Numerous studies suggest that past experience of violent conflict affects deep determinants of behaviour; counterintuitively, the current consensus is that it promotes pro-social behaviour. However, long-term effects of the experience of violent conflict and the narratives that shape people's lives post-conflict are more nuanced and multifaceted.

This study, conducted in Uganda in 2018 by nine co-authors, combines an experimental set-up using priming to better establish causal relationships with systematic and semi-structured qualitative and ethnographic work. The study design makes use of micronarratives (which the respondents self-signify along various dimensions) as a prime to measure deep determinants of behaviour. Qualitative research and micronarratives allow us to unpack the mechanisms behind the relationship between recalling the experience of conflict and behaviour. We find that remembering the conflict changes the way people behave, that the experience of inclusion can be contradictory, and that idleness might be an unexpected expression of agency.