Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198856474.003.0003
R. Tapscott
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.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-17DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780198856474.003.0002
R. Tapscott
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.
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