Publications

How should one read political and historical literature on modern authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism, and state formation in Africa from a Ugandan vantage point? This is the central theoretical question that Rebecca Tapscott asks in this new study on the postcolonial state in Uganda. In eight chapters, Tapscott navigates the ‘micro-dynamics of governance in Uganda’, in which she identifies a variety of modern authoritarianism thought to be peculiar to Museveni's Uganda: ‘institutionalized arbitrariness’.

Introduction to this Issue

Beyond the Secular: Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex investigates the contemporary relationship between religion and politics through a critical reading of Jacques Derrida’s political thought. Its central claim is that Derrida’s thought offers powerful resources to rethink such a relationship beyond the secular paradigm.

The idea and relevance of Compulsory Land Acquisition are central to the claims of many modern states world over. But how should we think of this practice in a post-colonial neoliberal context? This is the question at the heart of the theoretical criticisms and debates regarding Uganda’s Compulsory Land Acquisition Programme. In this debate, the government claims, and affirms, that a law on Compulsory Land Acquisition is needed because the government requires ‘land for development’.

Abstract This study contributes to the understanding of ethnicity in local government politics in Uganda. The idea here is to explain how ethnic patriotism was possible under the circumstances in which the colonial mode of governance rigidly recognized only one official identity of the Batoro in Toro. In comparison, the study demonstrates how the response from the colonized in Kigezi set parameters outside the indirect rule politics partly because the colonial mode of governance there was flexible in as far as it recognized the multi-ethnic identity of Kigezi.

Books reviewed in this issue include Renewing Workers’ Education: a radical vision (2020); A Short History of Modern Angola (2019); Decolonization in Universities: the politics of knowledge (2019); and The Political Economy of Government Subsidized Housing in South Africa (2020).

Why does mass violence persist in Africa? Focusing on Uganda’s Rwenzori region where thousands have perished in a century of recurrent fighting between one ethnic group and another and between successive governments and the Bakonzo society, Yahya Sseremba examines how remedies advanced to address violence end up reproducing the institutional logic that drives violence. If the problem started in the early twentieth century when the ethnic groups that were not allocated tribal homelands (Bakonzo and Bamba) questioned the British creation of the

Migration and its resultant remittance have become the two powerful forces of peasant transformation in Eritrea in the last decade. If the former is responsible for uprooting labor from land, the latter is a replacement value to what the labor would have produced from the land.

In this issue, we emulate the model we initiated in The MISR Review, no. 3. The bulk of the issue is a set of three lectures on a single theme; each lecture is followed by a set of comments, one or two. The lectures were organized around a single theme, Palestine as a Question, given by Raef Zreik from Tel Aviv University. The three lectures were titled: 1. Formation; 2. Justice; and 3. Decolonisation. We saw the lecture series as a way of introducing a debate on two critical questions: Israel/Palestine, and decolonisation.

This article examines why the emancipation of ethnic groups has failed to address ethnic conflicts in Uganda. Successive Ugandan governments, especially the current regime of President Yoweri Museveni, have attempted to end the country’s history of ethnic strife by creating separate constituencies, separate districts and separate kingdoms for marginalised ethnic groups to free them from the domination of powerful ethnic groups.