Uppsala University

Faculty Member, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology

Other Affiliations: Uppsala University, The Hugo Valentin Centre

About

I am associate professor of cultural anthropology, since mid 2009 working with The Hugo Valentin Centre, a multi-disciplinary centre of Uppsala University, Sweden, where I am a researcher in political violence and genocide studies. As of 2012, I am also a senior lecturer in the Dept of Cultural Anthropology & Ethnology at Uppsala University. Back to the scene of the crime, perhaps. After studies and a PhD in cultural anthropology (2003, Uppsala University), and besides teaching at Uppsala University, I have worked at Gulu University (in periods, 2005-2007, teaching and research) and Stockholm University (2007-2009, mainly teaching and student supervision).

Since 1997 I have conducted recurrent fieldwork in war-torn Uganda, with a focus on how young adults, born into civil war, understand and attempt to control their moral and material circumstances. The Acholi of northern Uganda have lived in the crossfire of a violent civil war that started in the 1980s, with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and other groups fighting the Ugandan government. Acholi have been murdered, maimed, and driven into displacement. Thousands of children have been abducted and forced to fight.

Still today there is no end to these volatile developments. I currently investigate violent conflict in emerging global realities, with the aim to develop an analytical framework that can advance our understanding of the global travels of war, made manifest in life stories and lived experiences. Focusing on Africans (and Europeans) living in Europe and in Africa as well as in-between, I suggest that war is both global and embodied. This approach also indicates my more general interest in the possibilities and potentials for ethnographic writing, and hereby I want to reanalyze old questions about of victim and perpetrator; of impunity and justice; of centre vis-à-vis periphery and of peace and war in our times; and how peace and war are connected and even interdependent.

My most recent article, on the LRA's violent response to the International Criminal Court intervention, is called "Humanitarian death and the magic of global war in Uganda" (2012, see more under papers).

With Neil L. Whitehead, I have edited ”Virtual War and Magical Death,” an anthology forthcoming with Duke University Press.

I am the author of "Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda" (Duke University Press, 2008), for which I was honored with the 2009 Margaret Mead Award, offered jointly by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology.

I am a contributing author to the following anthologies, available on amazon:
"War, Technology, Anthropology" (Berghahn Books, 2012)
"The Lord's Resistance Army" (Zed Press, 2010)
"Localizing Transitional Justice" (Stanford University Press, 2010)
"Crisis of the state" (Berghahn Books, 2009)
"No peace, no war" (James Currey, 2005)
"Navigating youth, generating adulthood" (The Nordic Africa Institute, 2006)

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