How Uganda outsources violence to stay in power

HOW do authoritarian rulers survive in the context of democratic institutions? This is a long-standing puzzle that has become more pressing with the rise of authoritarianism in the 21st century.

In theory, democratic institutions should allow citizens to vote out elected officials, who don’t pursue the public interest, or hold them accountable via other measures, like an independent Judiciary.

Most of today’s authoritarian regimes that hold regular elections, have a formal separation of powers and a relatively independent press. Scholars have called these hybrid or electoral authoritarian regimes.

I set out to research this puzzle of authoritarian rule. I focused on Uganda because it provides a clear case of an electoral authoritarian regime.

President Yoweri Museveni has held power since 1986 under the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement. The State is seen as increasingly repressive.

However, it holds regular elections and meets some other basic criteria of a democracy. This includes a nominally independent judiciary, inclusive suffrage and a fairly free press.

In studying Uganda, I identified a type of governance that uses unpredictability to combine democratic institutions with authoritarian power. I call this “institutionalised arbitrariness”.

Uganda is unique in many ways. Nevertheless, my research offers some insights for contemporary practices of authoritarianism worldwide. It also offers insights into the working of post-liberation African States like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Zimbabwe.

The research

I carried out fieldwork in Uganda, studying local violent actors. I held more than 300 interviews with local security actors. These included vigilantes and community police, community members and government representatives.

I attended public events like community meetings, and collected village-level bylaws and other documentation that helped triangulate what people told me.

I studied the interactions between State authorities and informal security actors to understand who can use violence and how, and the implications for State authority. For instance, I looked at how vigilante groups were formed in different communities and what they did. This included how they enforced local order and when they were seen to overstep their mandate. I also studied Uganda’s Crime Preventer programme. My aim was to understand who joined it, what activities crime preventers were asked to do, and how the programme joined national-level politics to the grass roots.

Key findings

Uganda has limited capacity to fully monopolise violence in its territory or provide basic services to its citizens. It relies on repression, but its limited capacity means that it cannot silence dissent systematically and reliably.

My research analysed the interactions between State authorities and informal violent actors. What I found was surprising.

First, State actors encouraged the formation of these groups and gave them the job of using violence to police their communities. This was an active outsourcing of violence to nonState actors.

I also found that local violent actors tried to consolidate their authority — as might be expected. They imposed bylaws and extracted resources in the form of fees and taxes. They also provided varying degrees of security and justice.

But the groups didn’t consolidate. Instead, they remained fluid and poorly defined. This was in part because their membership often got into trouble with State authorities for using excessive violence, or intervening in matters that were later determined beyond their remit. As a result, they were unable to succeed to a level that would meaningfully threaten State control.

The failure of violent local actors to consolidate was not for lack of trying. Across my cases, vigilantes and other local security actors tried to formalise control over a specific jurisdiction, usually their village.

They also emulated established authorities. For example, they printed ID cards and adopted titles like president, secretary, and even in one case, a “whip master” who was tasked with caning wrongdoers.

⬤Rebecca Tapscott is an Ambizione Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and concurrently a visiting fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh’s Politics Department. She researchers political violence, security, and authoritarianism, gender and research ethics. She is the author of Arbitrary States: Modern authoritarianism and social control in Musevenis Uganda (Oxford University Press 2021).