This is part of a month-ish-long blog/Instagram project. For more, go here.

It’s reading week.Wrapping up my semester (and my time here at Yale), I’ve been spending time working on my thesis, grading papers, and reviewing language study.

Obviously, this is pouring into my letter tiles. Although I don’t know where geology came from, as I have pretty much interest there. My interests lie on the left side of the image: war, rebels, language. So, pardon me while I get all thesis-y again in this blog project:

I think the language of the LRA conflict is an interesting thing to delve into, a thing I only mention in passing in my current project. The way that people are labeled, the way that actions are identified, they mean a lot of things in war. Perhaps the most important is the term “rebel” and how it is used (or not used) in the context of the LRA. Existing as a rebel group since 1986, for many years the government labeled them “bandits.” In the post-9/11 era, “bandits” was dropped as the LRA became “terrorists” in the discourse. This was just one part of the government’s effort to get in on the GWOT funding/training pie, and painting the LRA as terrorists placed the government, as the one fighting terrorism, in more exalted status.

But sometimes the rebels aren’t even rebels. For instance, when 11 LRA were recently captured by the UPDF, it was reported as 1 rebel commander and 10 captives. Everyone reports it this way, ignoring the fact that the commander himself was likely abducted in the past, and without mentioning if any of the captives were actively engaged in the fire fight. In the LRA, the labels of rebel, abductee, commander, and captive are very fluid. Many commanders are also captives, and victims of abduction and conscription have also perpetrated acts of violence. It’s a messy thing, trying to decipher the language of war, but it’s a necessary part of trying to understand it.