179 9 Youth in Transition Te Arts and Cultural Resonance in Postconfict Northern Uganda Lindsay McClain Opiyo and Tricia Redeker Hepner T hree decades ago, art therapist and scholar Harriet Wadeson ( 1980, 3 ) stated, “Life, Meaning, Creativity, Art. In the largest sense, they are all one.” In a diferent yet con- temporaneous vein, sociocultural anthropologists began ethnographically document- ing and theorizing, through diverse cross-cultural case studies, that “there is nothing innate in human nature that constitutes a barrier to perpetual peace, except willful ignorance” (Montagu 1994, xii; Howell and Willis 1989; Sponsel and Gregor 1994). In yet a third and related development, anthropologists interested in human rights and social justice linked elements of an emergent anthropology of peace with longstanding disciplinary interests in violence, confict and aggression to develop a rich and criti- cal body of scholarship analyzing the fexible appropriation of the “universal” notions of human rights and justice among societies coping with the impact of domination, poverty, war, and political confict (see Preis 1996; Merry 2006a; Wilson 1997 ). Tis chapter weaves together elements of these intellectual strands to critically examine how the creative arts have played a central role in the formulation and dissemination of ideas and practices associated with peace, reconciliation, and human rights among the Acholi—notably the youth—in contemporary postconfict northern Uganda. For over two decades, the people of northern Uganda have sufered from severe persecution and marginalization both at the hands of the government of Uganda and through the violence of rebel insurgencies: namely, the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA (see Opongo, this volume; Ochen, this volume). Since independence in 1962, nearly every corner of the country has undergone some period of violence resulting from rebellion, state intimidation, or regional and tribal division—an unfortunate remnant