In sub-Saharan Africa, civil wars continued, resulting in a huge number of victims and perpetrators in the 1990s. However, many of them came to an end in the 2000s. For the first 20 years of peace, perpetrators and victims have lived together within the same state and even within the same region. These people have kept silence to prevent mutual ill-will based on war experiences from surfacing each other, so that perpetrators also have been able to live as 'normal people'. Thus, We can regard the early 21st century as an era of coexistence fraught with tension.
Also, this century is an era of transitional justice. Global standards of justice have been modified by compromises based on local situation. Nevertheless, on the point of local people's view, global practices are very different from the one of everyday life that has been tacitly accepted behavior and untold but shared common sense. It has made explicit the categories of victims and perpetrators, which have been made ambiguous by local people. More recently, a concept of ‘trans-generational harm’ has been presented, which expands the scope of victims. However, the expansion of victimization by this concept reveals the category belonging to the past of former soldiers, who live well after the war. Moreover, it also risks putting a temporary stop to the category of 'ordinary people' created in everyday life.
This report aims to identify how people perceive the categories of perpetrator and victim, which stretch and shrink between global and local standards, and how they specifically use them in their daily lives. The study deals with my own data obtained through observations of outreach activities conducted by the International Criminal Court in northern Uganda and interviews with local people who are ex-soldiers.
