Buried in the Heart Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda Cambridge Studies in Law and Society Series

In Buried in the Heart, Erin Baines explores the political agency of women abducted as children by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, forced to marry its commanders, and to bear their children. Introducing the concept of complex victimhood, she argues that abducted women were not passive victims, but navigated complex social and political worlds that were life inside the violent armed group. Exploring the life stories of thirty women, Baines considers the possibilities of storytelling to reclaim one's sense of self and relations to others, and to generate political judgement after mass violence. Buried in the Heart moves beyond victim and perpetrator frameworks prevalent in the field of transitional justice, shifting the attention to stories of living through mass violence and the possibilities of remaking communities after it. The book contributes to an overlooked aspect of international justice: women's political agency during wartime.

List of figures; Preface; Foreword; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. The new Acholi; 3. The originals; 4. Grandmother; 5. Seven stories; 6. Conclusions; Light Juliane Okot Bitek; Index.

Erin Baines is an Associate Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. Her publications include Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (2004) and the life history of a woman who spent eleven years inside the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), I Am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming my Life from the Lord's Resistance Army (2015). She has published articles on gender, responsibility and transitional justice, DDR, social repair, symbolic violence and forced marriage in the Journal of Peace Research, the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ), African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies, and the Journal of Human Rights.