CONSTRUCTING COHESION, COUNTERING CONFLICT. PASTORALIST FOODWAYS IN MOROTO DISTRICT, KARAMOJA

Journal articles, NGO reports and news media commonly set Karamoja and its pastoralist people in a scene of contestation and struggle: cattle-rustling-related violence, government policy and security issues putting pressure on the mobile nature of the pastoral lifestyle, climate change induced extreme weather, and severe malnutrition. Such a scene brings along several players – such as development NGOs and the Ugandan government – acting in response, quite often simplifying the situation, and subsequently overlooking crucial components that keep people together in that challenging context. In this article I argue that the foodways of Karamoja’s (agro)pastoralist people make up an important constituent of a strong shock-resistant social base that communities uphold and play a particularly pivotal part in preventing and resolving conflict within and between those communities. The way in which food does so is twofold. Firstly, by fostering a strong sense of involvement and cohesion within communities, and secondly by acting as a vehicle to facilitate conflict resolution events, such as inter-communal peace talks or village-level conflict-settlement processes. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .