Looking through the lens of disputes and their resolution, this article examines the efforts undertaken by refugees to guarantee peaceful coexistence within and around settlements in northern Uganda. Based on extensive fieldwork, the authors examine which disputes occur within and around the settlements and which actors intervene to mediate and solve them. They identify a hierarchy among the different formal and informal actors involved in the resolution of disputes and show how refugee leaders operate as brokers between Ugandan law and South-Sudanese customs, between here and there, a recent past and imagined future in the home country. This finding comes to clarify the process of local integration, by foregrounding the link between law and culture. Some of the dispute-settlement outcomes facilitate the refugees’ integration into Uganda as a host country, while other resolution strategies are geared towards a long-awaited return to South-Sudan.

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