Opening the black box of student government in authoritarian contexts: institutional work and intra-organisational conflicts in the Students’ Guild at Makerere University, Uganda

Abstract

Student governments are important actors in higher education governance and also in more general political processes, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the research on student governments has thus far focused on the relations with higher education authorities and political parties, often without investigating their internal dynamics, thus risking of conceiving them as more homogeneous than they are likely to be. Analysing the internal dynamics of student governments is necessary to understand why student leaders, on behalf of their representative organisations, act and position themselves the way they do externally. This case study of the Students’ Guild at Makerere University addresses this knowledge gap by uncovering and analysing internal conflicts of student governments, contributing with new empirical and theoretical insights on students’ institutional behaviour and institutional ambiguity, in the context of authoritarian African states. While internal conflict is expected in any student government, this is anticipated to be even more the case in a conflictual context where there are strong links between students and national authorities. The approach is, in theoretical terms, based on the institutional work perspective and relies on extensive fieldwork at Makerere University. I find that the student government is far more conflictual and heterogenous than previous literature suggests. Rather than comprising representatives who act unitarily, it is characterised by intra-organisational conflicts due to competing institutional work, which reflects representatives’ multiple, diverse and divergent interests and institutional goals.