Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), remains at large two decades after the International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants against him and four of his commanders.
The LRA emerged nearly 40 years ago. Between 1987 and 2006, northern Uganda’s civilians were caught between LRA brutality – massacres and mass abductions – and a government counterinsurgency. This forced nearly two million people into camps for internally displaced people.
The LRA framed its struggle as resistance to President Yoweri Museveni and the sidelining of the Acholi, the dominant ethnic group in northern Uganda. However, over time violence ceased to be merely a strategy. It became the organising logic of the movement itself.
