Masculinity and militarisation under an illiberal democratic regime

Rebecca Tapscott explores how Uganda's ruling regime leverages tensions between masculine ideal-types to govern young men in the informal security sector

The government has long hands

Rebecca Tapscott highlights some of the findings from her recently published paper ‘The Government Has Long Hands: Community Security Groups and Arbitrary Governance in Uganda’s Acholiland‘ (JSRP Paper 24

Arbitrary States

In recent years, scholars of authoritarianism have noted a trend in which institutions designed to check arbitrary power have been hollowed out to facilitate its exercise. As they grapple with how to understand the disjunct between state institutions and enforcement power, scholars of sub-Saharan African states have been doing so for decades. Based on in-depth field research on local security in Museveni’s Uganda, Tapscott offers an innovative and provocative contribution to studies of authoritarianism and state consolidation: rulers maintain control by creating unpredictability in the everyday lives of local authorities and ordinary citizens. In this type of modern authoritarian regime, rulers institutionalize arbitrariness to limit the space for political action, while they keep citizens marginally engaged in the democratic process. By showing not just that unpredictability matters for governance, but also how it is manufactured and sustained, this book challenges and extends cutting-edge scholarship on authoritarianism, the state, and governance

What does vigilantism tell us about the state and public authority?: in cartoon

As part of a series of six comics on public authority in different countries across Africa, Kenyan cartoonist and comic artist Victor Ndula has illustrated CPAID’s cutting-edge research on issues of public authority, vigilantism, policing and public justice in Uganda. Based on real events, the comic asks: what happens when a town tries to fight crime using vigilantes

Today’s authoritarians project power through militarised masculinity

How do today’s authoritarian rulers project national-level power into the lives of ordinary citizens? CPAID Fellow Rebecca Tapscott highlights the importance of ‘militarised masculinities’ and explains how their performance enacts a foundational tension between discipline and impunity that generates political power

(In)security groups and governance in Gulu, Uganda

Last November, at three in the morning, a man was murdered on the street not far outside Gulu Town. There were tens of witnesses, yet there was no investigation, no prosecution, and no compensation provided to the victim’s family. A common reflection on the event was that the victim “did good to die”

Naked bodies and collective action: repertoires of protest in Uganda’s militarised, authoritarian regime

How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes—and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with country- or region-wide political action

The power of naked protest in a shrinking democratic space

Even while new technologies transform political protest, citizens continue to use their bodies in acts of civil resistance. In northern Uganda, citizens are using public nakedness to protest land dispossession by an increasingly authoritarian state, which grants the protester forms of power and highlights constraints on political speech

The Origins and Legacies of Unpredictability in Rebel-Incumbent Rule

Many rebel groups ‘govern’, becoming increasingly institutionalised, accountable, and predictable. This is now well-accepted; however, less attention has been paid to another common observation: some rebel orders—and rebel-incumbent regimes—are more aptly characterised as unpredictable. We find that this is because they adopt vague mandates and delegate provisional authority. Our analysis shows that, in some cases, this (1) allows rebels to accommodate potentially incongruous pre-existing authorities and institutions, which can integrate unpredictability into early governance arrangements; (2) helps rebels cultivate social control from a comparatively weak position; and (3) has enduring legacies for rebel-incumbent rule. We illustrate this argument with Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) and explore broader relevance with the Afghan Taliban

25 Years of Civil Wars : Identifying Key Developments Through the Reviews Section

This introductory essay to the Reviews Section of Civil Wars 25th Anniversary Special Issue explores key paradigms in the field of conflict studies, and how they have evolved, ranging from new and critical approaches to knowledge production; to conceptualisations of political violence and civil war as dynamic, relational, and potentially order-making and a new demand to centre research ethics in our work. Among other things, this introduction calls on scholars of civil wars to cultivate and maintain spaces for critical dialogue and reflection – not just on methods and findings but also on broader questions of the processes and politics of knowledge production – to ensure the health and advancement of our sub-field