Violence, Governance, and Uncertainty

The majority of today’s authoritarian regimes are characterized by a paradox in which democratic institutions exist alongside the ruler’s exercise of arbitrary power. The continued existence of civic spaces and democratic institutions can create opportunities for citizens to organize and make claims on the regime. How do rulers maintain control under such circumstances? To contribute to this ongoing debate, this book identifies ‘institutionalized arbitrariness’ as a new form of authoritarianism. Regimes characterized by institutionalized arbitrariness do not try to eliminate civic organization or democratic space, but instead use unpredictable and violent intervention to make those spaces fragile. They are more concerned with weakening competition than with maximizing control. To elaborate these dynamics, this chapter links everyday experiences of local insecurity in Uganda to contemporary debates about authoritarian rule. After positioning Uganda under President Museveni as a key case of modern authoritarianism, the chapter outlines the study and previews the book’s main findings.

Arbitrary Governance in Africa and Beyond

The book concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of arbitrary governance today. It highlights the implications of the findings for literature on authoritarian regimes and state formation, and looks at the additional cases of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe to further probe the external validity of the theory. The analysis shows that aspects of arbitrary governance are common across cases, and that institutionalized arbitrariness can usefully be applied beyond Uganda. The chapter concludes by discussing avenues for future research, including how international aid and improvements in surveillance technologies shape arbitrary governance, and the resultant dynamics between state and society in this type of modern authoritarian regime.

Varieties of Arbitrary Governance

This chapter uses sub-national variation to probe alternative explanations for arbitrary governance. Evidence from three additional research sites in Uganda—Mbarara, Moroto, and Soroti—shows that violent conflict and political leanings shape how institutionalized arbitrariness manifests, exaggerating certain components and attenuating others. Such differences result in ‘varieties’ of institutionalized arbitrariness that, taken together, bolster and nuance the argument that arbitrary governance is a distinct type of authoritarian rule. The results are presented in a typology of four varieties of institutionalized arbitrariness, each corresponding to a different study location. The typology illustrates some of the different outcomes produced by changing combinations of state violence, fluid state jurisdiction, unpredictable state presence, and institutional fragmentation. The chapter then uses these variations to examine some limitations of the theory, including questions about the regime’s intent and citizens’ agency.

Claiming Jurisdiction

This chapter studies how Uganda’s vigilantes seek—and fail—to consolidate authority over local communities. In contrast to scholarship that depicts the ambiguous space between state and society as a fertile environment for the emergence of new public authorities like vigilantes, this chapter shows how state actors’ unpredictable assertions and denials of authority make jurisdictions fluid, forestalling the emergence of new public authorities. Jurisdictional fluidity is reflected in routine inconsistency about what places, times, people, and activities fall under the authority of a given actor. The space between state and society is fragile and inhospitable to the emergence of new authorities. Local vigilante groups seek to consolidate power by adopting symbols and practices of state authority. A case study of the rise and fall of one vigilante group highlights how fluid state jurisdictional claims destabilize the political playing field for those seeking to consolidate power autonomously from the state.

Institutionalized Arbitrariness in Uganda (1986–2016)

This chapter reviews institutional and historical factors that have allowed Uganda’s National Resistance Movement regime to dominate society and cultivate a population that, in many aspects, polices itself. Focusing on the years between 1986 and 2016, the chapter traces three institutional trajectories of the Ugandan state, which contextualize institutionalized arbitrariness. The first is the bifurcated nature of the state at independence, when colonial-era state institutions split from the informal workings of post-colonial political power. The second trajectory concerns the double nature of the National Resistance Movement regime—a political movement on one hand, and a military on the other. The third is the role of external aid in propping up this complex system. The chapter highlights the tensions between institutionalization and personalization that lay the groundwork for institutionalized arbitrariness. It places Museveni’s Uganda in regional and global context to identify external factors that reinforced Museveni’s regime and checked its power.

Whither the State?

The chapter studies the complex relationship between state and society, drawing on scholars including Timothy Mitchell and Joel Migdal who see the distinction between state and society as produced through practice. It looks at how Uganda’s ruling regime manipulates the relationship between state presence and absence, such that citizens are sometimes categorized as outside the state, sometimes as agents of the state, and—most often—placed in a liminal space where their standing vis-à-vis the state is ambiguous. The chapter examines Uganda’s flagship community policing programme, Crime Preventers, described as a ‘floating population’ that works as the regime’s ‘eyes and ears’ across the country. By mobilizing crime preventers, the regime fostered the possibility of state presence while keeping crime preventers themselves in a liminal space from which they could make few claims on state authorities.

Violence, Sovereignty, and the Uganda Police Force

How does the Ugandan state produce and sustain the perception among citizens that it commands overwhelming violence? Through a study of the Uganda Police Force, this chapter examines four elements that blur the distinction between lawful and exceptional violence: first, institutional fragmentation obscures the source of violence and undermines accountability; second, the militarization of state and society confuses who can legally purvey violence on behalf of the state; third, the regime engineers law to mask exceptional acts of state violence as lawful; and finally, spectacular and public acts of violence, such as elite assassinations, create widespread speculation about and fear of exceptional state violence. As a result, state violence is unpredictable both in its intensity and its accountability. The manipulation of the relationship between lawful and exceptional violence produces and sustains both fear and hope, making it difficult for ordinary citizens to manage or ignore the possibility of state intervention.

Arbitrary Governance and Modern Authoritarianism

How do modern authoritarian rulers project power? Until now, scholars of authoritarianism have emphasized a balancing act between coercion and patronage while scholars of post-colonial and neopatrimonial states draw attention to elite settlements. This chapter identifies arbitrary governance as a third and as yet unexplored way that today’s authoritarian regimes project power. Regimes that employ institutionalized arbitrariness do not delegate authority; instead, they stabilize control and project power directly into the lives of ordinary citizens through unpredictable assertions of authority that undermine the political autonomy of those who might otherwise challenge it. This chapter elaborates the theoretical underpinnings of institutionalized arbitrariness, and offers a four-part analytic framework that combines inductive findings from field research with scholarship on authoritarian regimes in Africa and beyond. The framework explains how regimes institutionalize unpredictability, showing not just why unpredictability matters to maintain authoritarian rule, but also how it is manufactured and sustained.