Governing Peace: Regional Engagements on Migration, Conflict and Displacement in South-West Uganda

Calling Uganda a refugee-hosting country is technically accurate and almost entirely misleading. It describes a legal status while obscuring a lived reality: that in the south-west of the country, displacement is not a condition that arrived and settled. It moves. It crosses borders and comes back changed; it competes for land and water and school places; it sits in the same waiting rooms and walks the same roads as the communities that were there before it. There is a question that tends to get buried in the statistics of how many people Uganda has received, and it is this: what happens to the places that receive them? For decades, South-West Uganda has been answering that question quietly, imperfectly, and largely without the attention the effort deserves.