Complex political perpetrators: reflections on Dominic Ongwen

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dominic Ongwen is an indicted war criminal and former child soldier in one of the world's most brutal rebel organisations, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen is at once victim and perpetrator: what justice strategy is relevant? I introduce the concept of complex political perpetrators to describe youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces in settings of chronic crisis, and who use violence as an expression of political agency. Ongwen represents a troupe of young rebels who were ‘bred’ in the shadows of illiberal war economies. Excluded from the polity, or rather never having been socialised within it, such complex political perpetrators must be recognised in the debate on transitional justice after mass atrocity, lest cycles of exclusion and violence as politics by another means continue.