Everyday violence and environmental change in Uganda

project summary

This innovative project will develop a research-based agenda on the relations between violence and climate change from a decolonial, intersectional and everyday perspective in Uganda. Anchored in a strong partnership between Makerere Institute of Social Research, DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, Land Equity Movement in Uganda, and the African Centre for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, the project will conduct empirical, critical and innovative social research on violence and climate change across three socio-environmental fields, where relations between climate change and violence appear intense: forests and grasslands; farms and lakesides; and settlements and towns. Climate change exacerbates exclusion and inequality and increases risks of violence and conflict, but most scholarly work describes this link in terms of large-scale causal relations. Combining the project partners’ unique track record in studying intimate, communal and sovereign practices of violence, the project will enrich this scholarship by grounding the relationship between climate change and violence in local socio-environmental contexts and focusing on the experiences and practices of less spectacular, everyday forms of violence. Specifically, the project asks: How and to what extent do relations between communities and public authorities become violent in the context of environmental change in Uganda?

Through interdisciplinary approaches and with a decolonial and intersectional lens, the project will strength the capacity of the partners to design and implement social research, to disseminate results and to achieve societal impact. The project’s firm commitment to community involvement will ensure local leadership in knowledge production and the translation of research to practice through rights-based participation of new community-based stakeholders affected by environmental change and violence in key policy debate on climate change. In turn, the partners will engage national, regional and global stakeholders to inform pro-poor climate action and empower people at risk of violence in the context of environmental change. In sum, the project brings empirically and conceptually grounded research insights to bear on the scholarship on climate change and violence, while contributing to turn climate action in Uganda and elsewhere in inclusive and non-discriminatory directions that may prevent violence and promote equity and social justice.