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Our aim in this article is to contribute to understanding the effects of firearms on the relationship between the state and pastoral communities in contemporary northeast Uganda. The Karamoja region has from early colonial times been a peripheral zone. Although successive post-colonial regimes have made episodic efforts to incorporate this zone more fully into Ugandan national space, relations between Karamoja and the centre remain distant and distrustful. The transformation of local modes of conflict by large-scale infusion of the AK-47 has had far-reaching effects both on relationships with the Ugandan state and its local representatives, and within Karamoja societies. The younger men who possess these weapons elude the authority of the elders, and entertain ambiguous relations with the state authorities, whom they may serve as auxiliaries or resist.

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■ Abstract In the 1990s, simultaneous with a wave of democratization that proved only partially successful, Africa was swept by protracted civil conflicts, which had a number of novel attributes. The Great Lakes region-Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda, and Burundi-was the epicenter. In their dynamics and demographics, the violent combats became interpenetrated, embroiling the three countries in intractable struggles. Their extraordinary complexity, and multiplicity of state and other actors, interrogated a number of distinct literatures. State decay and collapse, a broader phenomenon in Africa, was especially marked in Congo-Kinshasa. In all three countries, the irresistible pressures for democratization-which were part of a broader African patterntriggered violent struggles over definitions of identity, citizenship, and indigeneity. The legal, moral, and analytical issue of genocide returned to the research agenda with a vengeance with the Rwandan catastrophe in 1994, and mass ethnic killings in Burundi and Congo-Kinshasa. The new dynamics of African civil wars and warlord politics demanded inquiry. Finally, the necessity of international intervention to contain and mediate the violence brought new attention to peacekeeping issues.

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