“Think Positive, Save a Life”? Resilience and Mental Health Interventions as Political Abandonment in a Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the entanglements of resilience-based refugee policies and mental health interventions in the refugee settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda. I argue that both resilience refugee policies and mental health humanitarian interventions stem from a neoliberal logic which shifts responsibility onto individuals for their psychological and economic wellbeing. I show that there are direct links between chronic food insecurity and rates of mental illness among South Sudanese refugees in Palabek settlement. By individualising social suffering, mental health discourses and interventions mask the failures of humanitarian assistance in Uganda. As such, they justify and enable the political abandonment of refugees.

Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank Dr. Julian Hopwood and Dr. Ryan O’Byrne for their support and insightful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to the residents of Palabek refugee settlement for their time and willingness to discuss their lives with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Neoliberalism is here explicitly understood not merely as a manifestation of a specific economic agenda that decentralises the state’s governance function, but as a political project of ‘government at a distance’ that acts directly upon individuals’ subjectivities, encouraging free conduct through a logic of ‘responsabilisation’ of citizens (Dean 2010) and of ‘economisation’ of individuals’ social and political lives (Foucault 2008[1979]).

2. Northern Uganda is characterised by a unimodal rainfall, with a long rainy season lasting generally from March to November (Atube et al. 2022), and a single growing season, with harvesting occurring in August and September (Epule et al. 2021).

3. It is worth noting that the food cuts announced during this speech would come into effect in April 2020, amidst the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and sudden national lockdowns on a global scale. The Ugandan lockdown, in particular, involved severe restrictions on movement and was among the longest and strictest in the world. The combination of aid cuts and the lockdown would result in severe consequences for refugees’ livelihoods and wellbeing (see e.g., Bukuluki et al. 2020, Stein et al. 2022).

4. Interagency meeting, Palabek refugee settlement, 27 February 2020.

5. Financial training in the context of CBT-T intervention delivered by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) in Palabek refugee settlement, 14 November 2019.

6. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these circumstances further narrow refugees’ already extremely limited long-term options (Hansen 2018). This is likely to result (and indeed already has) in an increase in mobility towards South Sudan – both in the forms of permanent ‘voluntary returns’ and in the temporary, informal, and livelihood-oriented movement described by O’Byrne and Ogeno (2020). As the latter have argued, the security situation of South Sudan is so dire that refugees’ return to the country, driven as they are by the scarcity of resources in Uganda, represents a significant failure of refugee protection by UNHCR and Ugandan institutions alike.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Rockefeller Resilience Foundation: IGA-Rockefeller Funding Call [IDVTA], and by a ESRC PhD Studentship (ESRC ES/P000622).

Notes on contributors

Costanza Torre

Costanza Torre, MSc MRes, is a PhD candidate at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an affiliate researcher at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA) at the LSE. Her research explores the socio-political lives of public and mental health interventions in complex emergencies and with minority populations; the current expansion of global mental health thinking and practice in humanitarian emergencies; and the role of structural and social determinants of mental health.