The data includes 1318 descriptions of land disputes in the Acholi Sub-region of Northern Uganda, collected as part of a UN Peacebuilding Fund project, the Land Conflict Monitoring and Mapping Tool in two rounds in March and September 2012. Respondents were local dispute mediation actors. Some of this data, where one or both parties to a conflict were women, was up-dated through phone interviews in January 2014, with the rest up-dated through phone interviews in August-September 2015. Interviews were mainly conducted in Luo and recorded in English. The final round of up-dating was analysed and the data cleaned under the ESRC Trajectories of Displacement grant in 2017.Northern Uganda experienced one of the world's most notorious instances of forced displacement during and immediately after the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency, which started around 1986 and ended on Ugandan soil in 2006. Northern Ugandan displacement was notable for its duration - in some areas for well over a decade; and for the fact that it involved the entire rural populations of the affected areas from around 2002, including all of rural Acholiland - around one million people - with a further eight hundred thousand from neighbouring communities. For the first 16 years of the conflict there was virtually no humanitarian assistance to the affected population, which only began in earnest after 2003. However for the following ten years, while the population was displaced and later, from 2007, returning to and re-establishing their homes, large amounts of international funding were spent. Aid was deployed on physical infrastructure, support for state security, education and health services, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, peacebuilding and transitional justice initiatives, and agricultural and other livelihoods development. Northern Uganda's was a model international intervention. There was a humanitarian phase during and immediately after the conflict, a transition phase during the return and resettlement phase, followed by development interventions to enable the war affected population to regain some of the lost ground caused by displacement and war, to help them attain the same level of development as the rest of the country. Compared to many conflict and post-conflict environments, northern Uganda's was straightforward. The security, political and logistical challenges were all manageable and the LRA conflict was of a sufficiently high public profile that funds provided by governments and international institutions were substantial. The intervention in northern Uganda was, it is reasonable to assume, done as well as these things can be done. However there has been little attempt to learn from the Ugandan experience. This research aims to correct this deficiency through understanding displacement and return through the perceptions and understandings of the people concerned. The outcome will be a series of studies that together evaluate not so much specific interventions but the lived experience of cumulative interventions in different sectors. It will look at communities' understandings of their own coping strategies and resilience; of the current state of their social capital and civil society as they interpret the notions and what has helped and hindered in the post-conflict recovery period; and of how ten years of international aid interventions, largely 'off the shelf' but sometimes attempting something more targeted, have affected their lives. In this sense the project will address humanitarian-development impunity, which is fostered by neglect - perhaps active rejection - of learning opportunities, as has been seen so far in northern Uganda. We aim to create a model for community-centred post-intervention evaluation across sectors. The research team are soon to conclude work on the Justice and Security Research Programme, which has been filling a massive knowledge gap on the experiences of ordinary people around security in Central Africa, and what are the public authorities - in practice very often not the state - which provide security services. The forced displacement programme will build on this model and this experience, seeking to understand displacement and return through the lived realities of affected people, in the process challenging the comfortable assumptions of the development industry. We predict that interventions in different sectors will emerge as positively and negatively experienced by populations in terms of their long-term outcomes, and that this learning will be disseminated in ways that can influence interventions in other post conflict settings.

The methodology involved seeking data at rural Parish level. A Parish is an administrative division under the administration of an elected council (Local Council 2 / LCII). Parishes are made up of Villages or Sub-wards under the administration of an elected Local Council 1 / LCI, the smallest government administrative entity. LCII courts were also the first formal land dispute resolution bodies. It was decided to focus exclusively on rural parishes on the basis that the nature of land administration, landholding and land disputes in urban areas is quite different to that in rural areas and would necessitate an entirely different methodology to monitor and map. Moreover the vast majority of the Acholi population is rural. The rural Parish-level focus provided a parameter or definition of sorts of the disputes we were measuring: those that were known about and considered problematic at Parish level. However success depended on consistency, which in turn depended on our respondents grasping the purpose of the exercise and responding in the approximately the same way across the Sub-region. It is possible that numbers will have been distorted by the fact that Parish-level leaders are also residents, and thus may include village, sub-village, and family level disputes from their own locales that would not otherwise qualify as Parish-level events. However we concluded that such distortions are likely to play out fairly consistently, while having groups of, on average, three from each parish, representing different sectors (customary and local council) would reduce these. Typically a Parish has a population of around 5,000 people and on average is made up of ten Villages, although this varies dramatically across the sub-region, with fewer, larger villages in the western and northern districts. It was our assumption that while leaders of such a population would be unlikely to know every adult or every nuclear household, they would be aware of all clan and extended family groups within the area, and would be part of a network of local leaders and family heads responsible for addressing problem conflicts. Through this they would become aware of most land conflicts that were protracted or causing concern at lower levels. Five research tools were developed: 1) Parish-level Disputes Form (PDF) seeking overview information on numbers of recent and current disputes, numbers of disputes involving violence, numbers of disputes involving 10+ households; and organisations or individuals important in resolving land disputes; 2) Individual Dispute Questionnaire (IDQ) aiming to capture detailed information on as many recent or current disputes as each parish group could manage to complete (this is the data shared here); 3) Parish Village List (PVL) form to identify all villages in each parish; 4) Village-level Form (VLF) on land tenure, land use, and any clan(s) associated with the village and with recognised land rights there; 5) Outline parish maps on which participants were asked to draw approximate village boundaries, and where possible additional detail including clan distribution. Data was collected through a team of Acholi-speaking researchers mobilising groups from each parish, typically consisting of the LCII Chairperson, an elder with broad local knowledge of customary land issues and a third person with local land expertise from either the customary or LC sectors. These individuals were identified with the help of Sub-county (LCIII) authorities and brought together for one or two days in each of two research rounds in Sub-county-wide meetings. While LCII Chairs were invited to bring records of the land cases heard by their courts with them, this rarely happened, probably because in most cases such records did not exist. The methodology had the strength that the informants generally had extensive knowledge of land matters and specifically land disputes and customary land holdings in their Parishes. On the other hand, is important to recognise that these informants often had little formal education, were sometimes not literate or numerate, and were usually providing information from memory. In this context it is important to understand that information especially around dates, time periods and specific numbers is likely to be impressionistic rather than precise. Notwithstanding these limitations, we are aware of no source of more accurate information on these matters. Two rounds of data collection were undertaken: in February / March 2012 and in August / September 2012. Recording mobile phone numbers of respondents allowed me with the assistance of two experienced Acholi-speaking researchers to re-contact them to up-date and clarify information in the IDQs. In January 2014 we identified all conflict records involving a woman or female headed household as either or both parties to a dispute (202). The rest were up-dated, again through phone interviews between August and September 2015.