We are proud to announce that Frank Emmanuel Muhereza successfully defended his thesis titled,"The Transformation of Karamoja: Sedentarization of Pastoralists and the Adoption of Settled crop farming" on Wednesday January 24 2018. His main supervisor was Prof. Mahmood Mamdani and the opponent was Professor Issa G. Shivji, Professor Emeritus, Univ.of Dar es Salaam and the Director of Nyerere Resource Centre, Tanzania.
His dissertation seeks a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of the problems engendered by initiatives aimed at the transformation of Karamoja as an entry point to explain why interventions by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government in Karamoja aimed at sedentarization of pastoralists and adoption of settled crop farming and large scale commercial livestock ranching: (a) are unlikely to have the intended effect of delivering Karamoja from its unending vulnerability to annual food shortages, and halting the rising incidence of absolute poverty among the majority of ordinary Karamojong, and (b) have instead facilitated not only the extension, entrenchment and consolidation of political control over Karamoja, but also laid the foundation for an unbridled exploitation of its natural and other resources. He undertakes an analysis of the epistemological and theoretical foundations of development pathways preferred by different governments since the colonial period to identify their ruptures and continuities, in order to mobilize Karamoja’s past experiences with government interventions, drawing lessons from it, to illuminate the complex dynamics of Karamoja’s present, as a strategy to re-imagine Karamoja’s future.
He is the fifth student to earn a PhD through the MISR Interdisciplinary PhD programme in Social Studies.
Congratulations Dr. Muhereza!