The Lord's Resistance Army emerged in northern Uganda in the late 1980s from the wreckage of an earlier movement led by Alice Auma Lakwena, who had claimed to be possessed by a spirit. Joseph Kony, her relative, made a similar claim and assembled a force.
Its methods produced one of the longest and most destructive insurgencies in modern Africa, and its central instrument was the abduction of children. Estimates run to tens of thousands over two decades, taken from villages and schools, boys as fighters and girls as forced wives.
The mechanism that held them is the most brutal in this part of the guide, and it is worth stating exactly because it is not a metaphor.
New abductees were compelled, on capture, to commit violence — frequently against people from their own village, sometimes against a family member or a fellow captive who had tried to escape. This was done publicly and the child was made the direct agent.
This severs return. A child who has killed someone from their own community cannot go home, not because the LRA prevents it but because they believe, often correctly, that they will not be received. The coerced perpetrator has been given an identity that the outside world will not accept, which makes the group the only remaining place they can exist. Trauma researchers call the resulting condition moral injury, and it is distinct from fear-based control: the captor does not need to guard someone who has nowhere to go.
Layered on this was a spiritual regime. Recruits were anointed with shea oil in patterns said to confer protection from bullets, given rules and taboos — do not eat certain foods, do not step over certain lines, walk in particular formations — with the teaching that violating them removed the protection and caused deaths. This does two things. It attributes casualties to the child's own failures rather than to the LRA's tactics, and it reduces perceived agency: outcomes are determined by spirits and rules rather than by decisions.
And violence within the group was unpredictable. Punishments were arbitrary in timing and severity, which is the condition Seligman identified as producing learned helplessness — when the relationship between action and outcome is destroyed, escape behavior is not merely risky but stops being generated.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Kony and four commanders in 2005. Dominic Ongwen, himself abducted as a child of about nine and later a commander, was convicted at the ICC in 2021 and sentenced to twenty-five years — a case the court had to confront directly as both victim and perpetrator, and one of the most difficult judgments in its history.
Kony has never been captured.