^{(Photo: A MONUSCO Peacekeeper patrols along Lake Kivu in Goma, North Kivu. Every day, UN military personnel are on patrol, providing vital security and stability in troubled regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo MONUSCO/Myriam Asmani)}

Project management:Axel Paul
Project team: Anne Laube
Project duration: 01/2014- 12/2017
Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

For decades now, the Great Lakes region of Central East Africa has been wracked by civil wars. The majority of analyses focus on the ethnopolitical and/or economic conditions and structures of the conflicts. However, the so-called “new wars” in general, and the Central East African (civil) wars in particular, have been characterized by extreme violence and cruelty towards the civilian population on the part of armed groups. A number of mostly quantitative studies have attempted to understand the extent of the unilateral violence perpetrated against civilians within the framework of the general logic of intrastate wars. These studies do not, however, explain how and why violence by non-state groups against non-combatants regularly spills over into violent excess. There was therefore a need to build on earlier, mainly macro-sociological work by conducting further micro- and meso-sociological studies at the qualitative level, which focus on local violence and, above all, take a closer look at collective actors. This research project focused on the organization of violence and cruelty in the atrocities of the Lord's Resistance Army as a case study.

Laube, A. (2018) Leading Violent Lives. On Everyday Life and its Organization in the Lord's Resistance Army. Dissertation University of Basel, Publication .

Paul, A. and Laube, A. (2015) "Gewaltzwang. History, War and Organization of the Lord's Resistance Army", in: WestEnd 12(2), pp. 3-30.