Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) Collections

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 74
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    Shifting Perspectives on “Pastoral” Violence: The Persistence of the “Karamoja Problem” in Uganda
    (Makerere University, 2026) Lomokol, Olive
    This thesis examines the historical and political construction of the “Karamoja Problem,” a category that has long shaped scholarship and state policy in Uganda. Existing analyses often treat pastoral mobility, cattle raids, and violence as inherent features of Karamoja society, obscuring the historical processes through which these phenomena emerged. Addressing this gap, the thesis argues that the “Karamoja Problem” is a political invention of colonial and postcolonial governance, and that violence in Karamoja functions as a political language rooted in disrupted pastoral institutions, contested sovereignty, and the state’s long history of criminalization and militarized control. Adopting a qualitative and decolonial approach, the research treats archives, oral histories, and ethnography as situated texts rather than neutral sources. It centers Karamoja’s knowledge systems and political institutions, engaging concepts such as Arem, Asapan, Alomar, and Akiwor. The study reconstructs precolonial distributions of power across elders, women’s institutions, and warrior formations, examining how these structures regulated social order, including the practice of Arem. It demonstrates how colonial and postcolonial interventions—such as the suppression of cultural practices, destabilization of the governance structures, and criminalization of raids—reshaped authority, social reproduction, and agency, giving rise to new forms of resistance, including women’s political action and the emergence of Alomar as an anti-colonial warrior formation. The thesis makes theoretical, empirical, and policy contributions. It challenges state-centric and criminalizing narratives of violence, situating it within historical disruption, contested authority, and local socio-political orders. Empirically, it foregrounds previously understudied actors and institutions, revealing the complex dynamics of governance, agency, and moral economies. Practically, it informs policy by highlighting the limits of militarized interventions and advocating approaches grounded in Karamoja’s political, cultural, and pastoral realities. By engaging Karamoja’s own categories of thought, the study reconceives mobility, economy, and resistance, challenging narratives of disorder and presenting pastoralism on its own historical and intellectual terms.
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    Theatre for Development and the Nation : Rethinking Nation-Building in “Post-Socialist” Tanzania
    (Makerere University, 2026) Stanley Elias
    The discourses surrounding the Theatre for Development Movement (TfD) in “post-socialist” Tanzania present a complex yet compelling story of how popular theatre forms respond to and deconstruct official or dominant narratives in nation-building projects in Africa. Frameworks of resistance, appropriation, and co-option alone do not fully capture the intricate power dynamics shaping how different actors of nation-building in “post-socialist” Tanzania engage within TfD movement. Drawing on literary sources, performance observations, archival materials, and oral interviews, this thesis interrogates the nature of power relations among actors of nation-building within practice. Emerging from both the institutional politics of relevance and discourses of nation-building at the University of Dar es Salaam, TfD developed in ways that reflected these competing forces in its conceptualisation and its practice. This thesis explores how these competing forces shaped its logic, structure, and operations during a period of allegedly changing ideological posture marked by increasing marketization, cosmopolitanism, the flow of global capital, and growing parochial divisions such as class—all of which unsettled earlier understandings of the “National Question” in Tanzania. In particular, I show how TfD unsettled the state and elite-dominant narratives of nation-building while re-centering everyday imaginations from grassroots communities and their contributions to the nation. While advocates of TfD often celebrate discourses of grassroots inclusion in nation-building, this thesis, in particular, interrogates the hierarchical relations among actors within TfD praxis. It highlights how these hierarchies constrained the potential of grassroots communities to move from celebratory and symbolic inclusion to active participation in shaping their own narratives and those of the nation. Yet within these power relations, I argue that “spaces at the margins” emerge—what I term “spectacles of absurdity”—in which communities assert agency through what I describe as a “poetics of negotiation,” enabling them to transform and contest dominant narratives and articulate alternative imaginaries of nation-building rooted in everyday experiences.
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    Beyond Representation: Generational Memories and A Contemporary Making of Nigerian Middle Belt Conciousness
    (Makerere University, 2026) Mbasughun, Mackenzie Ukpi
    Much of the history of minority groups in post-colonial societies is tailored within dominant official narratives geared towards a hegemonized national consciousness. In Nigeria, colonial processes of erasure are often reproduced in sub-nationalism, leading to counter attempts by minorities to produce dissident accounts that seek to articulate themselves in the national project. This study articulates the generational transitions of ethno-religious minority groups in Middle Belt Nigeria and the contestations of creating political meaning against existing representations. The major contribution of the thesis is the development of a decolonial memory web as a conceptual framework grounded in archive, narrative, space, and performance metaphors to demonstrate decolonial memory work as a necessary tool of assessing the nature of consciousness as a network in post-colonial societies. This research maps ideological and cultural mobility in Nigeria’s Middle Belt through remembering from a contemporary generation as they re-imagine themselves in political transitions from the sub-colonial imaginary of the 1920s, to the struggle for the creation of states in the 1950s, and the cyclical bouts of violence and conflict from the 2000s to the present. I argue that the contemporary collective self of the Middle Belt mediates its identity through cultural production in digital content, music, festivals, and literature to form a collective Middle Belt culture and consciousness that acts as a critique of national consciousness. The study offers new insights into post-colonial subjects and their evolving, volatile political environment, which is often lost in studies that privilege elite historical accounts of conflicts as superior to ordinary memory accounts. Finally, I argue through my analysis that the Middle Belt consciousness in generative moments of ‘post-conflict’ delinks from the coloniality of memory that centers the erasure and disavowal of the post-colonial Middle Belt, and reconfigures memory into mnemonic resources as an aspirational tool of legitimacy for minorities through the collective self-imagination of the Middle Belt.
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    Kyapa mu Ngalo and the land question: understanding the politics and dynamics of land reform in Uganda
    (Makerere University, 2024) Lunyago, Muhamed
    Taking Buganda kingdom’s Kyapa mu Ngalo program and the central government’s calls to abolish Mailo land tenure as entry points, this thesis interrogates the contemporary land question in Buganda by tracing its historical development. It contends with existing explanations that attribute the question to cultural nationalism and neopatrimonialism to argue that the land question in [B]Uganda is rooted in the historical and political economy contexts within which it has materialized. Deploying interdisciplinary approaches while foregrounding heterodox political economy, the thesis analyzes the colonial and postcolonial framing of - and responses to - the land question in [B]Uganda and the material conditions within which peasant subjects have subsisted to show how land reforms and ‘development’ initiatives have historically marginalized, subjectified, alienated and dispossessed the peasant society. To illustrate this argument, the thesis summons oral, archival and library sources to explores the ways in which the colonial epistemological, political and economic transformations displaced precolonial land relations in ways that produced and reproduced colonial state power and consolidated the colonial capitalist economy. The colonial and capitalist processes of depoliticization, commodification and privatization of land resulted into dispossessions, alienations, displacements and evictions of peasants. The thesis further highlights how the postcolonial states’ attempts at (re)framing and responding to the land question have innovatively reified the colonial and capitalist logics in ways that have intensified land problems. Reflecting an enduring process of capitalist incorporation, the Buganda land question has been worsened by the growing influence of neoliberalism and the structural power of (finance) capital, rendering it a state-market affair with the exclusion of society in ways that depoliticize and weaponize the peasants to achieve political legitimacy and sustain capitalist accumulation. Contrary to their stated objective of addressing the land question, the postcolonial land reforms, and the political and discursive contest between the central government and Buganda kingdom, have instead exacerbated the peasant subject condition. Lastly, the thesis recenters the peasants by engaging discourses that emerge from society as a decolonial move to imagine conditions of possibility for peasant emancipation. I think with the society’s discourse of Ettaka Nyaffe as mirroring possible alternative modes of socio-economic organization. In doing so, the thesis foregrounds the multiple and complex forms of land use, values and meanings that the society has embraced historically as an epistemological counter to the neoliberal market-oriented conception of the land question, one that fortifies colonial and neoliberal capitalist principles.
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    Traditional Institutions and State Power: Culturalist Contestations in Buganda and Ankole
    (Makerere University, 2024-11-04) Atwijuka, Anitah
    This thesis examines the decolonial potential of society-based campaigns seeking to preserve culture through the creation of kingdoms and skeletal kingdoms in contemporary Uganda. In two different regions of Buganda and Ankole, Uganda experienced two incidents that were seen as direct assaults on the cultures of the peoples of these places. In Buganda, violence broke out in 2009 when the state prevented the Kabaka (king) from visiting a district in his kingdom. In Ankole, members of society erupted in anger when political authorities replaced a cow sculpture at the entrance of Mbarara city in 2019. Whereas the two conflicts are separated by a decade, I approach both as manifestations of nationalism from below at the heart of Uganda’s history and politics. If the protests in Ankole and Buganda erupted in the name of culture, many Ugandan societies see in the creation of kingdoms and cultural institutions the most effective means of preserving culture. Whereas observers have identified some emancipatory potential in such society-based initiatives, this thesis argues that the campaigns for the creation of kingdoms or skeletal kingdoms fuels the politicization of ethnic difference in the sense that they establish ancestry and cultural identity as the basis for political rights in a specific kingdom. In other words, culturalist contestations reproduce the colonial tribalist logic of governance. Such pro-kingdom society-based campaigns are derivative of the colonial fashioning of identity. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the methods of historical, political and anthropological studies, the thesis overcomes the conceptual and methodological narrowness that defines the state-centric understanding of nationalism prevalent in African scholarship.