The garrison state: militarisation of governance in Uganda: law, power, and the future of constitutional democracy

Abstract

The term “garrison state” enters the literature of political science through Harold D. Lasswell's 1941 essay, written against the immediate background of a world organising itself for total war. Lasswell's concern was not Africa, still substantially under colonial administration at the time, nor was it any particular constitutional order; it was a structural prediction about the direction in which industrialised states under sustained security pressure would tend to move. His thesis was that prolonged preparation for violence produces a distinctive elite—the “specialists on violence” — whose claim to authority rests not on electoral mandate or technical administrative competence but on the management of coercion itself, and that as the salience of external threat grows, this class tends to displace the “specialists on bargaining” who dominate liberal, commercially organised polities.