From disaster to devastation: drought as war in northern Uganda

Abstract

This paper proposes a shift from the concept of disaster to one of devastation when dealing with the destructive consequences of climate change. It argues that today, a discourse of climate-change disaster has become dominant, in which present disasters are seen as harbingers of a future of widespread climate disaster, products of a global nature in upheaval. The paper contends that one needs to go beyond the series of dichotomies that the climate-change disaster discourse relies upon: future/past, global/local, natural/social. To frame climate disaster as a product of global climate change, and conflict the product of those climate disasters, is to occlude the forms of environ- mental violence and experience of climate change among disaster-affected communities. Through an exploration of the drought in Uganda, the paper asserts that disaster should be understood as embedded within ongoing, longstanding, multiscalar processes of devastation produced by his- tories of human engagement with the environment, including that of war.