Post-Conflict Land Restitution Delays and Trauma-Related Mental Health Crisis Presentation in Northern Uganda: An Instrumental-Variable Analysis of Court Backlog Variation

Prolonged land restitution proceedings in post-conflict northern Uganda have been linked to psychological distress among displaced populations, yet the causal direction of this association remains contested because delayed cases and poor mental health may share common determinants. The analysis specifies delay as a function of case assignment to courts with differing docket congestion, conditional on case characteristics and district fixed effects, and derives the conditions under which backlog variation satisfies the exclusion restriction. Using the DHS Program indicator on current users' most recent supply or information from a government health center across 36 African countries and 150 country-survey observations between 1990 and 2025 (mean 25.261, standard deviation 18.895), the paper calibrates the scale of health-system contact in the study region and situates the proposed design within it. The contribution is a defensible identification strategy for a question that has been treated only correlationally, together with an explicit statement of the assumptions under which the estimated effect would be interpretable as causal. Court backlog is a plausible instrument only when docket assignment is demonstrably unrelated to claimant mental health, and it specifies the falsification tests that would adjudicate that claim.