Understanding affect and emotion as constitutive of the law allows us to rethink popular conceptions of modernity. The Lord’s Resistance Army conflict in particular ‒ the center of the Dominic Ongwen case ‒ has been portrayed as an example of the emotional, pre-modern other plaguing Africa in a state of unfinished modernity. When we begin to theorize modernity itself as something that is felt and that feels in specific ways, we can no longer maintain the idea of modernity as freed from or free of emotion. This has consequences for thinking about the relationship between the Global North and the Global South. Going beyond ascribing rationality to non-European societies in order to counter colonial and racist undertones in modernity theory, which was a key project for anthropologists in the past (particularly in legal anthropology), this chapter makes the plea to rethink the idea that rationality itself is a mode of conceiving of the world in a non-emotional way. Rekindling Bruno Latour’s famous statement that "we have never been modern," this chapter argues that we have also never been rational. (~3,000 words)