At Canberra's Australia for UNHCR Donor Briefing, there is a map of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on the large screen behind the Congolese social activist Sister Angelique Namaika (pictured, left).
Dozens of small red marks are clustered on it, like flames, indicators of recent attacks by one of the world's oldest guerrilla armies.
For almost twenty years, across the settlements and subsistence farms of Central Africa the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has preyed upon civilian populations with exceptional cruelty, emerging from the bush in small units to commit unspeakable atrocities.
Like Nigeria's Boko Haram, its tactics have focused on the destruction of local villages, abducting and raping woman and young girls, sexual slavery, mutilation and the grooming of child soldiers.
For many outsiders, the LRA's endurance has proved difficult to understand. For Sister Angelique, there can only be a negotiated solution to the ongoing war through the bringing together of representatives of the fragmented and traumatised peoples across the region.
Others have pointed out that there is no longer the political will or the consensus about what exactly can or should be achieved by such an initiative. Moreover, there is the common assumption, especially outside the region, that the worst of the emergency has passed; the LRA has been decimated and scattered, its leader, Joseph Kony, in hiding and probably ineffectual.
As Sister Angelique insists, the latter assumption is much mistaken. Beyond the enclaves of Internally Displaced People who are protected by UN peacekeepers, she says, there is no security. Families have been broken apart, community connections are being lost, so that to risk returning to one's village for a funeral or a wedding is impossible. Recent history has shown that the army's sexual violence and other forms of brutality is now more widespread than ever, reaching across porous borders from the DRC into the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
Initially made up primarily of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, the LRA emerged in the late 1980s as an armed reaction to what was seen as political and economic discrimination by the Baganda-dominated central government. Though small in number, it rapidly acquired a cult-like dimension under Kony's charismatic leadership. A self-proclaimed visionary, Kony appeared to convince his followers that his instructions came to him directly from the Lord himself.
Even during that first decade, the LRA targeted its own Acholi villagers, as well as the Ugandan National Army. In March 2014 a United