Speaker: Dr Mareike Schomerus, Vice President at the Busara Center in Nairobi

Chair: Dr Christine Cheng, Lecturer in the Department of War Studies

Dr Mareike Schomerus will discuss her book The Lord's Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa Dr Christine Cheng. The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is one of Africa's most notorious armed rebel groups. It has resisted the Ugandan government since 1986 and during this time operated across Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

When the LRA entered the Juba Peace Talks with the Ugandan Government in 2006, any possible peace deal seemed like a gift to fighters who had for years barely been surviving in central Africa's jungles. Yet the talks failed. Why?

This book includes exclusive interviews with and observations of LRA fighters and their notorious leader Joseph Kony. It shares insights into how the LRA experienced the Juba Talks, revealing developing dynamics and deep distrust within a conflict system and how these became entrenched through the peace negotiations.

Dr Schomerus will explore ultimately why current approaches to ending armed violence not only fail, but how they actively contribute to their own failure, concluding that a new approach to contemporary peacemaking is necessary.

About the speaker

Dr Mareike Schomerus, (PhD, LSE) is Vice President at the Busara Center in Nairobi. She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance at ODI in London, and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, also at ODI.

At Busara, she heads the Center’s work that links behavioral science, fragility and violent conflict. She is a widely published researcher with a body of work on violent conflict, political contestation and peace processes in South Sudan and Uganda and across borders, as well as behavioral mechanisms in post-conflict recovery, for which she has developed a body of work on the ‘mental landscape’ of lives in or after situations of violence conflict.

In addition to conducting and leading academic research, she has conducted applied research for a wide range of international organisations. She is the co-editor of two volumes (on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan 2020, 2013) and author of the monographs The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (Cambridge University Press 2021) and Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).