This chapter tests the book’s arguments in a case study from Uganda. The Ugandan government faced a series of armed rebellions throughout the country from 1986 to 2006, and it forcibly relocated civilians while fighting some rebel groups but not others. This chapter draws on a wealth of information collected during six months of fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 on how, when, where, and why authorities employed displacement. By exploiting within-case variation in the location and timing of relocation by the same government, the chapter conducts a structured, controlled comparative analysis. Drawing on original data – including archival materials, subnational violence and displacement data, and hundreds of interviews and surveys with political officials, military officers, rank-and-file soldiers, civil society groups, journalists, community leaders, and civilians – it traces the decision by Ugandan counterinsurgents to employ forced relocation, examine the observable implications of the theory, and demonstrate the assortative logic of displacement. It also shows that alternative logics are insufficient to explain variation in this case.

Given the plurality of uses to which the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ritual’ are put, we focus on only one tradition of thought about their relationship, namely that stemming from Austin – in which ritual is understood as an act or as a particular modality of action with ethical entailments. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument and to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. If ritual performance sets the criteria for ethical judgement, ethical concerns establish the choice of ritual performed. Ethical life is shaped by ritual enactment yet is also challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual, liturgical order, or theoretical apparatus can provide.

This chapter outlines the history of the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda, using the framings of war, peace and information. It gives an overview of the conflict history, including the deep sense of betrayal that guides the LRA. An overview of previous peace attempts highlights the reasons why these had failed – some of which were going to be mirrored in the Juba Talks. Through the history of peace attempts, the chapter connects actors in the Juba Talks to previous efforts and shows how the debate on peace shifted when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for five LRA commanders. In describing how the Juba Talks came about, the chapter uses the categories of space, ideology and affiliation to explain the identity of the LRA and its political wing, the Lord’s Resistance Movement. The chapter further argues that the LRA entered the Juba Peace Talks with the understanding that it would be a forum to deal publicly with the root causes of the war. They also hoped to gain better control of the narratives that had influenced this war, with a discourse in favour of the government.