Anthropological Quarterly

Drawing on ethnographic research among former members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, Sam Dubal’s Against Humanity grapples with how the concept of humanity is mobilized—both in official discourse about the war in northern Uganda, and by LRA rebels themselves. In doing so, he scrutinizes the moralizing representations of this war—evidenced most prominently in the US-based Invisible Children campaign and viral video Kony 2012—as one between the purportedly law-abiding Ugandan government on the one hand, and the “evil” LRA on the other. Dubal is explicit about his methods as well as his objectives: he positioned himself “squarely on the side of the combatants” (25)—not with the goal of humanizing or defending them, but to “carefully hear complex stories and narratives that escape most humanitarian and scholarly accounts of the LRA” (25). As such, he defies the norm of anthropology by drawing our attention away from a longstanding focus on the “marginalized” to engage a set of actors who researchers themselves might view as morally repugnant and thereby unworthy of study (see Clarke 2010).

As both a scholar-activist and a medical doctor, Dubal characterizes his work as inter-disciplinary, intended for scholars, practitioners, activists, and clinicians alike. The chapters of the book are roughly divided between the rebels’ wartime experiences and memories (Chapters 2, 3, 4), and the return home in the aftermath of war (Chapters 5, 6). His exploration of “gorilla warfare” (Chapter 3) demonstrates how the rebels disrupt normative ontological categories that separate the ostensibly inhumane “bush” from the moralized space of “home.” And by shedding light on the uncertain realities confronted by former rebels upon their return (“home”) to civilian life, Dubal troubles the illusive binary between war and peace. In a brief interlude between Chapters 4 and 5, for example, Dubal offers an insightful [End Page 591] discussion of the so-called “reintegration” programs designed to reform LRA members. Through conversations with reception center employees and medical workers on the one hand, and former rebels on the other, he scrutinizes the moralizing frameworks underpinning reintegration even as he illustrates that the actual process unfolds quite differently from its stated objectives.

The author extends his lens beyond Uganda to problematize and theorize the category of humanity itself; in doing so, he invokes the work of Sylvia Wynter (2010), Saidiya Hartman (1997), Alex Weheliye (2014), and Lisa Lowe (2015), all of whom contend with the racist and colonial legacies of Western liberal conceptions of the human. For Dubal, being “against humanity” is a heuristic designed to break free from a hegemonic concept that otherwise “chains us to specific notions of the good while disposing of alternative visions of freedom and justice” (12). Despite its seemingly benign and compassionate connotations, “humanity,” writes Dubal, “seeks not to democratize access to the good, but rather to monopolize control over it—doing violence to the very concept by dictating the parameters of what counts as good” (212). Like James Ferguson’s (1994) conceptualization of “development” as an anti-politics machine, discourses of humanity similarly work to obscure politics, expanding “the power of the moral as an instrument effect” (211–212). And yet, in contrast to Ferguson’s seemingly homogenous “machine,” Dubal’s ethnographic findings illustrate the limits of this hegemonic notion of humanity. Chapter 6, for example, offers an instructive analysis of how demobilized rebels (many of whom were abducted as children and forced to fight) maintain their identity as politicized militants “even as they accepted charity and humanitarian aid” (34). As such, Dubal challenges the idea that categories like “victim” work to deny actors their political agency. In the case of former LRA rebels, this argument “overestimates the subjectifying power of humanitarian regimes and discourses” and ignores “the complex ways in which ex-rebels themselves speak and act in the trenches of such regimes and discourses” (209). This suggests that “humanity,” like other concepts, is a historically contingent project that is capable of...