The political dilemmas of global justice: Anti-civilian violence and the violence of humanitarianism, the case of northern Uganda

Humanitarian intervention presents a dual dilemma: although justified as a redemption of human rights, it tends to eradicate the political conditions of possibility for the realization of those rights; although purporting to save lives, reduce suffering, and resolve conflict, it can prolong conflict and intensify the suffering of those in whose name it takes place. This dissertation argues that these two dilemmas are intimately related, in that the deleterious political effects of humanitarian intervention---its tendency to undermine political autonomy among its subjects and to consolidate the power of unaccountable political forces---are precisely what, in certain circumstances, lead to its inefficacy or counterproductivity.; By bringing together realist, cosmopolitan, and Foucauldian approaches, the dissertation develops a novel methodology for analyzing the negative effects of humanitarianism, effects stemming both from its capacity for instrumentalization and from its internal logic. Simultaneously, the dissertation is guided by a normative orientation towards the political values of local autonomy, democracy, and popular sovereignty; this allows an internal reconstruction of humanitarianism's self-understanding, bringing the political back into what is generally presented as an exclusively moral domain while maintaining humanitarianism's concern with justice.; In order to show concretely how these negative political effects can translate into negative practical effects, the dissertation explores the case of the civil war in Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, based upon nine months of fieldwork there.; The dissertation's broader normative goal is to reveal the theoretical implications these dilemmas have for conceptions of global political order and global justice. By bringing the popular agency of the global South into account theoretically, while recognizing its indeterminacy from the perspective of the Northern analyst or humanitarian, the dissertation problematizes the dominant discourses of global governance and global justice, revealing the need for a newly self-critical theory and practice in crossing the global North-South divide. It concludes by reorienting humanitarianism towards practices of intensive self-critical political solidarity and of negotiated humanitarian dis-intervention.