Elections as Ritualized Sites of Violence and Memory in Uganda
Nalutaya Shakirah
Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University
Contact me at: research@shakirahn.com | Website: https://shakirahn.com
Abstract
In popular conceptions of the modern state, the introduction of the secret ballot is celebrated as a turning point of political maturity in the postcolonial world. It is envisioned as a shift from the rule of force to the rule of law, where institutional competition, rather than violence, is used to resolve political disputes. Elections, within this framework, are understood as moments of democratic renewal, national unity, and the realization of popular sovereignty, where the ballot replaces the bullet as the legitimate instrument of political change. However, this normative vision obscures the ways in which electoral periods themselves become sites where violence is most visible, most organized, and most legitimate.
The 2021 Ugandan general election did not mark a departure from the violent political past of the nation. Instead, it functioned as a contemporary rehearsal of that history. Far from operating as neutral mechanisms for democratic choice, electoral periods in Uganda serve as ritualized arenas in which the violent past converges with the coercive present. This convergence activates accumulated forms of physical, structural, symbolic, and moral violence, transforming elections into spaces where historical violence is acknowledged, reorganized, and redeployed to discipline political life. This paradox, which both promises popular sovereignty and permits repression, makes elections an illuminating way to study the nature of state power.
This study approaches elections not as isolated procedural moments centred on polling day but as lengthy extended political processes that unfold before, during, and after voting. Focusing on the 2021 general election cycle, this study argues that the violence witnessed was neither accidental nor indicative of institutional failure. Rather, it constituted a deliberate commemorative war, a ritual through which the state reasserted its authority by reenacting its historical role as the guarantor of ‘order’ through force. This violence was not new, as it reflected the culmination of long-standing structures of domination rooted in colonial conquest, postindependence militarization, and the foundational violence of the National Resistance Movement. Viewed through these lenses, electoral periods in Uganda function as primary moments through which the state renews its historically produced legitimacy by subjecting the population to both physical and psychological discipline. Elections, therefore, become theatres of remembrance in which the past is not simply recalled but actively mobilized to govern the present and constrain the future.
Keywords: Elections, Violence, Modern state, Memory, Rituals, National Resistance Movement.
Elections as Ritualized Sites of Violence and Memory in Uganda
Introduction
The 2021 general elections in Uganda exemplified a deliberate escalation of state violence, transforming electoral governance into a violent performative exercise of power rather than a conventional political process. Security operations were guided by military doctrine, symbolic performativity, and ritualized coercion, turning the election into a reenactment of Uganda’s historically violent political genesis (Otunnu, 2016; Tripp, 2010; Amnesty International, 2021). The militarized response extended to the structural organization of police forces. Officers were equipped with assault rifles, machine guns, armoured vehicles, and combat-style uniforms, reflecting military training and discipline (Finnstrom, 2008; Thaler, 2021). These measures positioned the state not as an arbiter of civil law but as a standing instrument of coercion, transforming the electoral process into a battlefield where political participation was conditioned by fear. Security Minister Elly Tumwine’s assertion that police had the “right to shoot and kill” citizens framed lethal force as a pedagogical tool, teaching the population the consequences of dissent and echoing colonial-era and early postcolonial methods of using punishment to discipline and civilize populations (Mamdani, 1996; Otunnu, 2016; Tripp, 2010). In these lenses, the 2021 election in Uganda illustrates how electoral cycles function as performances of coercion, linking historical forms of state violence with contemporary political objectives. Elections therefore are not merely sites of contestation but mechanisms through which the state reasserts its capacity to discipline, survey, and dominate the population, demonstrating that fear, militarization, and symbolic violence are central to the reproduction of political authority in Uganda.
Theoretical Foundations: The State as a Violent Entity
The 2021 general elections in Uganda were staged within a political landscape defined by an unprecedented spectacle of militarization, high-velocity coercion, and state-led lethality. Throughout the campaign and voting period, armed security forces occupied the state, opposition rallies were violently disrupted, candidates were arbitrarily detained, and political gatherings were subjected to restrictive regulation under public order and public health laws (Atuhairwe 2021; Khisa 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda 2021; Amnesty International 2021; Human Rights Watch 2022). Civil society organizations and Ugandan researchers documented widespread arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, beatings of civilians, torture in unofficial detention sites, and the use of live ammunition against unarmed protesters, particularly in Kampala and other major urban centres (Atuhairwe, 2021; Khisa, 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda, 2021).
Several explanations have been advanced to account for electoral violence in post-colonial African contexts, including Uganda. Some scholars argue that such violence reflects institutional weakness rather than deliberate strategy. From this viewpoint, electoral violence in Uganda is seen as stemming from poorly trained or inadequately managed police forces, fragile legal and electoral institutions, or episodes of spontaneous public unrest (Blair and Gisselquist 2019; Cheeseman 2015; Lindberg 2006). From this perspective, coercion is incidental, emerging as a byproduct of governance deficits rather than as a coordinated expression of state power.
However, the repetition, predictability, and coordination of violence across electoral cycles undermines this institutionalist claim. Uganda’s elections from 2001 onward illustrate remarkably similar patterns. In 2001, opposition candidates and supporters were pre-emptively detained, and security forces violently dispersed campaign rallies (Kasfir 2000; Rubongoya 2007). During the 2006 elections, police and military units were deployed to opposition strongholds in Kampala and Gulu, while opposition leaders faced arbitrary arrests and harassment (Tripp 2010; Branch 2011). In 2011, the government coordinated arrests of opposition figures, disrupted rallies, and suspended public protests under the guise of public health or security regulations (Khisa 2019; Atuhairwe 2021). The 2016 and 2021 elections further institutionalized these tactics, incorporating the pre-emptive control of communication networks, such as blocking social media and restricting online messaging, in addition to traditional measures of physical repression (Access Now 2021; Freedom House 2022). This implies that electoral violence in Uganda follows a familiar script: security forces occupy opposition strongholds, deploy in urban neighbourhoods during campaigns, disrupt rallies, arrest opposition leaders, and regulate digital and media spaces, often in synchrony across agencies (Atuhairwe 2021; Khisa 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda 2021; Amnesty International 2021, Kagoro, J. 2023).
Scholars of African politics emphasize that such systematic deployment of coercion across time and space reflects strategic intent rather than organizational failure (Schedler 2013; Branch 2011; Tripp 2010). They argue that consistency across decades demonstrates that violence is an anticipated and organized aspect of electoral management, embedded within the state’s operational logic rather than an episodic anomaly. The cross-temporal continuity demonstrates that violence is systematic and deliberate rather than spontaneous or incidental.
Another argument holds that elections have become less violent over time, with fewer mass killings and reduced overt confrontations between security forces and civilians (Kyomuhendo 2016; International Crisis Group 2012). While it is ‘true’ that the forms of violence have shifted, this evolution does not indicate a reduction in coercive capacity or political danger. Instead, violence has become more bureaucratic, preventive, and structural, increasingly embedded in administrative and legal procedures (Levitsky and Way 2010; Van de Walle 2003). For instance, the 2016 and 2021 elections relied heavily on the preemptive control of information, digital surveillance, and targeted arrests, rather than widespread mass killings, demonstrating a refinement of coercive techniques (Access Now 2021; Freedom House 2022). As Khisa (2019) and Tapscott (2021) argue, this bureaucratization of violence does not reflect pacification but the state’s capacity to impose control through subtler, institutionalized, and preventive measures. This demonstrates a refinement of coercive techniques, where violence is more strategic, targeted, and anticipatory illustrating a strategic and adaptive form of coercion that is ‘less visible’ but no less effective than overt violence.
In discussing about what causes electoral violence, some observers argue that opposition mobilization provokes state violence, framing repression as reactive rather than proactive (Hickey 2011; Cheeseman and Tendi 2010). This interpretation reverses causality. However, the Ugandan case indicates that electoral violence is anticipatory designed to shape the possibilities of political action rather than merely respond to it (Tripp, 2010; Branch, 2011). By defining political participation as a potential threat to order, the state creates a context in which violence is normalized, predictable, and morally rationalized (Branch, 2011). The state does not wait for protest or mobilization to occur; it pre-emptively constrains and disciplines political activity. During the 2006 elections, opposition rallies were heavily policed before large gatherings even convened, and local authorities selectively detained key organizers in districts known for anti-incumbent sentiment (Tripp 2010; Branch, 2011). In 2021, the use of curfews, permit restrictions for rallies, and coordinated arrests of National Unity Platform supporters demonstrated that the state sought to shape participation itself rather than respond to it (Khisa 2019; Atuhairwe 2021). By 2016 and 2021, pre-emptive measures had become more sophisticated: security forces targeted urban youth centres, disabled opposition communication through social media blackouts, and restricted gatherings in opposition strongholds prior to voting days (Access Now 2021; Freedom House 2022). These interventions indicate that the state uses elections to structure the political space, defining who may participate, how, and under what conditions, rather than merely reacting to opposition behaviour. Scholars of competitive authoritarianism highlight that such pre-emptive measures are designed to discipline political possibility itself, signalling to citizens and opposition actors the boundaries of permissible participation (Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2013). This anticipatory approach demonstrates that the state does not merely react to mobilization; it structures the political environment so that dissent itself becomes a calculated risk, reinforcing both coercive authority and citizen compliance.
International media outlets and election observation missions largely interpreted these developments through a liberal human rights framework, framing them as violations of civil and political liberties, including the rights to freedom of assembly, expression, due process, and life, as guaranteed under Uganda’s Constitution and international human rights law (Amnesty International 2021; Human Rights Watch 2021). These reports emphasized the excessive use of force by security agencies, the militarization of civilian policing, the targeting of opposition supporters, and the suppression of media and digital communication, including the nationwide internet shutdown imposed on the eve of the vote as suppression of human rights (Amnesty International, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2021; African Union Election Observation Mission, 2021; Access Now, 2021; Freedom House, 2022). Within this framework, violence appeared as an aberration excessive departure from democratic procedure serving primarily as evidence that the election had failed to meet accepted normative standards. Violence according to the international media thus signalled the erosion of procedural legitimacy by revealing a reliance on coercion at moments when electoral consent could no longer be credibly manufactured. However, while analytically powerful, this normative framing risks obscuring the political work that violence performs within authoritarian electoral systems. By treating repression as a deviation from democratic practice, it implicitly assumes elections are intended to secure consent, rather than to manage uncertainty and reproduce dominance.
Authoritarian election theory offers another understanding. From the perspective of authoritarian governance, elections in regimes such as Uganda are not mechanisms of accountability but instruments of rule (Schedler 2013). Schedler (2013) argues that authoritarian elections operate through formally legal institutions and procedures, where repression is embedded in electoral law and security governance, allowing coercion to appear rule bound and legitimate rather than arbitrary. They serve to display regime strength, map opposition networks, discipline dissent, and periodically reaffirm sovereignty (Schedler 2013). Within this logic, violence is not a failure of elections but one of their constitutive functions.
A more radical reading, however, refuses to treat violence as merely instrumental to authoritarian elections and instead understands it as structural and constitutive of the Ugandan state. Scholars of African politics argue that postcolonial sovereignty in Uganda has long been exercised through the regulation of political life by force and through the normalization of violence as a permanent condition of governance (Mamdani 1996; Tripp 2010). From this perspective, the deployment of lethal force, the suspension of civil liberties, and the public disciplining of political dissent are not signs of electoral malfunction but key techniques through which sovereignty is actively produced and displayed. Elections, in this lens, function as moments in which historical forms of state violence are restaged, legalized, and rendered visible in order to enforce compliance and reassert hierarchical political order (Mbembe 2003; Branch 2011; Finnstrom 2008).
Tapscott (2021) argues that violence operated not at the margins of the electoral process but at its core, structuring political space, regulating participation, and signalling to citizens that the ultimate guarantor of order was not electoral choice but force. The 2021 election, therefore, did not merely coincide with violence; it constituted a political conjuncture in which state power was performatively reasserted through coercion. Democratic procedure was transformed into a staged demonstration of authority, where the ballot was subordinated to the gun. In these lenses understanding the 2021 Ugandan elections requires a theoretical lens that situates violence not as a failure of democracy but as a constitutive element of political life situating violence as constitutive rather than incidental.
In this lens, Max Weber’s (1946) definition of the state as the entity that claims monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force provides a crucial starting point for understanding political authority in Uganda. In Weberian terms, the state’s legitimacy rests on its ability to exercise force in ways that are socially recognized and institutionally sanctioned. The Ugandan case resonates with this framework in several ways. Electoral coercion, militarized policing, and the suppression of opposition activity during the 2021 elections illustrate that the state actively enforces its monopoly over force and makes it publicly visible (Atuhairwe 2021; Khisa 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda 2021; Amnesty International 2021). Historical episodes, from the 1966 assault on the Kabaka’s palace (Mutibwa 1992) to the Bush War of 1980 –1986 (Mamdani 1983; Prunier 1995), demonstrate that the ability to impose order and control dissent has long been central to Uganda’s political authority. In this sense, Uganda exemplifies Weber’s insight that legitimacy is inseparable from the recognized exercise of coercion. The state’s authority is made tangible through acts of enforcement that communicate the boundaries of permissible political behaviour.
At the same time, the Ugandan case also highlights the limits of a Weberian focus on legitimacy as a claim. Authority in Uganda is not primarily secured by persuading citizens of the state’s right to rule, but by repeatedly demonstrating the capacity to impose order, punish defiance, and survive contestation (Khisa 2019). Power becomes credible through repetition, as acts of coercion accumulate into an accepted political grammar that is both historical and performative (Mamdani,1996; Branch, 2011). The state in this sense does not merely claim authority; it performs it publicly and ritually, ensuring that the social recognition Weber describes is continuously enacted rather than assumed. Electoral periods, therefore, assume a distinct political function. Rather than moments of uncertainty resolved through competition, elections operate as sites where the state reasserts dominance under conditions of heightened visibility.
Additionally, Achille Mbembe’s (2003) theory of necropolitics provides a critical lens for understanding how the Ugandan state exercises authority over life and death during electoral cycles. Mbembe argues that sovereignty in some postcolonial contexts is defined not only by the capacity to impose order but by the power to determine who may live and who may die. In Uganda, this logic was made vividly visible during the 2021 elections as the state systematically targeted opposition strongholds, particularly urban areas with large numbers of young supporters of the National Unity Platform, using live ammunition against protesters, widespread arbitrary detentions, and enforced disappearances (Atuhairwe 2021; Khisa 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda 2021; UN OHCHR 2021). Security spokespersons and government officials framed these interventions as necessary to protect public peace or to respond to what they called “criminal activity” among opposition supporters (Human Rights Watch, 2021). Labels such as “criminals,” “terrorists,” and “foreign-funded destabilizers” were deployed strategically, echoing Paulo Freire’s (2005) insight that violence originates from the denial of full human recognition. By dehumanizing parts of the population, the state made coercion, repression, and even death socially and politically visible, rendering necropolitical authority both public and ritualized.
In these lenses, Uganda’s electoral cycles reproduce Fanons (1963) logic that in societies emerging from anti-colonial struggle, violence remains foundational to political authority rather than receding with independence. Elections function as ritualized reenactments of liberation era authority, reaffirming the state’s capacity to punish dissent and enforce compliance (Mamdani 1983; Prunier 1989; Branch 2011). As curfews were imposed, rallies disrupted, and opposition organizers detained, the 2021 elections became a ceremony of domination in which obedience was normalized and resistance rendered dangerous (Khisa 2019; Tapscott 2021).
When assessed through historical and empirical evidence, interpretations that frame electoral violence in Uganda as spontaneous, declining, or symptomatic of state failure fail to capture its strategic and structural character. Rather than being episodic or reactive, violence is routinized, bureaucratized, and anticipatory, functioning simultaneously as a communicative, disciplinary, and legitimating instrument of rule. The predictable recurrence of coercive tactics across electoral cycles, the coordination of multiple security agencies, and the preventive targeting of opposition actors point to a deliberate political strategy rather than institutional weakness or reactive enforcement. As Mamdani (1996), Branch (2011), and Khisa (2019) demonstrate, the organization of political space through violence reflects the operational logic of sovereignty in Uganda, where coercive capacity and political legitimacy are mutually constitutive. From this perspective, electoral violence is not an aberration but a structural feature of governance, embedded in the everyday practices of the state. It operates to discipline citizens, delimit political participation, and publicly reaffirm the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence and its authority to determine life, death, and political belonging. The 2021 election, therefore, did not signal a breakdown of democratic norms; it exposed the enduring political logic through which power is exercised and sustained in a state where legitimacy remains inseparable from coercive capacity.
Colonial Modernity, Classification, and the Ethnicised Grammar of Electoral Violence
The 2021 Ugandan electoral cycle should not be read simply as a contemporary deviation from democratic norms, nor as evidence of institutional breakdown. Such interpretations rest on a liberal teleology that falsely opposes colonial violence to modern governance. Colonialism was itself a profoundly modern project, one that fused bureaucratic rationality, legal codification, racialized classification, and organized violence into a durable architecture of rule (Scott, 1998; Mamdani, 1996; Foucault, 2003). Seen through this lens, the violence surrounding Uganda’s 2021 elections was not an aberration but a historically intelligible political ritual: a modern reenactment of colonial pacification logics through which sovereignty has long been produced, displayed, and enforced. Independence in 1962 did not dismantle the colonial architecture of governance; it transferred control of its instruments (Mamdani, 1996).
The foundations of Ugandan statehood were laid not through consent or social contract but through conquest. When the British formalized the Uganda Protectorate in 1894, they did so following years of violent intervention under the leadership of Lord Frederick Lugard. Lugard’s deployment of the Maxim guns and Sudanese mercenary forces to suppress interreligious and inter-polity conflicts in the late nineteenth century established what he himself termed the “right of conquest” as the basis of political authority (Lugard, 1922). This was not merely brute force; it was an early articulation of colonial modernity, where technological superiority, administrative rationalization, and violence were integrated into a coherent system of governance (Bayly, 2004). Sovereignty, in this Lugardian formulation, did not emanate from the will of the governed but from the demonstrable capacity to impose order through violent means.
Central to this colonial political order was the doctrine of collective punishment, a technique widely used across the British Empire and codified in colonial law and military practice (Elkins, 2005; Anderson, 2014). Collective punishment erased individual culpability in favour of governing entire populations as suspect collectivises. Punitive expeditions, village burnings, forced relocations, and land confiscations were justified as necessary tools for managing “rebellious” or “backward” groups (Mamdani, 1996; Ranger, 1983). In Uganda, this doctrine operated unevenly and was deeply entangled with colonial political favouritism. Buganda was incorporated as a privileged ally within the colonial state, benefiting from indirect rule, land security under the 1900 Buganda Agreement, and disproportionate access to administrative power and education (Mamdani 1996; Reid, 2017). Buganda’s political elites were treated as partners in governance rather than as subjects to be disciplined, insulating the kingdom from the harshest coercive practices of colonial rule (Reid, 2017). By contrast, Bunyoro was subjected to sustained collective punishment following its resistance to British conquest and its opposition to the incorporation of Bunyoro territory into Buganda (Mutibwa, 1992). After Bunyoro’s defeat in the late nineteenth century, large swathes of its land, later known as the Lost Counties, were transferred to Buganda, dispossessing Banyoro communities and entrenching long-term grievances (Mutibwa, 1992; Mamdani, 1996). The population was further punished through forced labour, taxation, and administrative marginalization, with colonial officials explicitly framing these measures as retribution for Bunyoro’s rebelliousness (Reid 2017). Punishment thus became not merely corrective but exemplary, signalling to other communities the costs of resisting colonial authority.
By institutionalizing reward for loyalty and punishment for resistance, the colonial state transformed violence into a routine instrument of governance, embedding coercion within legal and administrative systems rather than treating it as an exceptional response. As Mamdani (1996) argues, this legacy of governing through collective discipline laid the groundwork for postcolonial forms of state violence that continued to target populations as political collectives rather than as rights-bearing individuals. The state did not encounter individuals as legal subjects but populations as problems to be managed. These hierarchies did not disappear with independence; instead, they were inherited, repurposed, and selectively mobilized by postcolonial regimes, which continued to rely on colonial administrative logics of rule (Mamdani, 1996).
Electoral moments in Uganda in the same response have not only acted as arenas of political competition but as critical junctures in which these colonial logics of classification are reactivated, revised, and enforced. The colonial state did not encounter individuals as rights-bearing legal subjects but rather constructed populations as administrative categories to be classified, managed, and controlled (Foucault, 2007; Scott, 1998; Mamdani, 1996). These hierarchical forms of governance did not disappear with independence; instead, they were inherited, repurposed, and selectively mobilized by postcolonial regimes, which continued to rely on colonial administrative logics of rule (Cooper, 2002; Mbembe, 2001; Mamdani, 1996). In a striking historical turn, the 2021 electoral violence effectively reclassified Buganda as the “New Bunyoro.” Because the NUP sweep of the central region threatened the National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) monopoly on power, the state discursively stripped the Baganda of their historical status as “custodians of order” and reframed them as “sectarian extremists” (Tripp, 2010; Golooba-Mutebi, 2021). In 2021, government spokespersons and state media framed the NUP as “Buganda-centric” or aligned with particular regional interests, recalling the centralization and ethnic favouritism of colonial indirect rule (Branch 2011; Khisa 2019). This violence of classification allowed the state to summon the ghosts of the 1966 Buganda Crisis, suggesting that a vote for Robert Kyagulanyi was a vote for “Ganda dominance,” thereby using colonial-era “divide and rule” tactics to consolidate support in the West and North by exploiting historical fears of Ganda expansionism (Mamdani, 1996; Kasozi, 1994; Mwenda, 2021). In these lenses, the state was not just fighting a political party; it was summoning the ghosts of the 1966 Buganda Crisis when the central government under Milton Obote attacked the Kabaka’s palace to terrify the rest of the country into believing that an opposition victory would mean a return to Ganda dominance. This violence of classification ensures that the election remains a site of historical grievance rather than a contest of ideas.
This symbolic ordering reproduces older patterns of marginalization without needing overt physical confrontation. The violence of 2021, therefore, commemorated the colonial period by its very breach; it was a ritual of “de-privileging” a region that had dared to imagine a sovereignty independent of the state’s military patronage. This arrangement did not simply reflect colonial-created ethnic hierarchies; it actively produced them, binding political legitimacy to colonial alignment. In these lenses, electoral competition heightens uncertainty over who belongs, who governs, and who constitutes a threat to national cohesion, transforming elections into moments of classificatory crisis in which the boundaries of political community are symbolically policed. This implies that while each election has a focal point, its violence is anchored in longer historical trajectories.
The NRM, Guerrilla Legitimacy, and the Moral Economy of the Blood Debt
The National Resistance Movement’s ascent to power in 1986 constitutes to not merely a military victory but the consolidation of a distinctive moral and political order grounded in the memory of armed struggle (Kasfir,1998; Mamdani, 1996; Tripp, 2010). The guerrilla campaign waged by the National Resistance Army, particularly in the Luwero Triangle, has since been elevated from a contingent historical episode into a foundational national myth that underwrites the regime’s claims to authority (Finnstrom, 2008; Branch, 2011). This process of myth making has emphasized the discipline, restraint, and political consciousness of NRA fighters, portraying them as rational and morally superior actors who rescued Uganda from state collapse, sectarian violence, and arbitrary rule (Museveni, 1997).
Central to this narrative is the Ten Point Programme, articulated during the bush war as both a political manifesto and a legitimating framework linking armed struggle to democratic renewal (Mamdani, 1996; Kasfir, 1998). The programme promised popular democracy, national unity, and the elimination of sectarianism, positioning the NRM as a revolutionary movement committed to structural transformation rather than mere regime change (Tripp, 2010). Over time, however, the Ten Point Programme has undergone a significant symbolic transformation. While originally a document for democratic reform, scholars like Nelson Kasfir (1998) argue that the NRM used these points to establish a “no-party” democracy (the Movement System), which effectively banned organized opposition for two decades under the guise of “national unity.” Rather than functioning as a policy blueprint against which the regime can be evaluated, it has become a quasi-sacral text, repeatedly invoked to affirm the NRM’s historical entitlement to rule regardless of policy outcomes (Mutebi, 2019). Its authority now derives less from implementation than from its association with sacrifice, suffering, and revolutionary victory.
This transformation underpins what can be described as the NRM’s moral economy of legitimacy. The regimes claim to authority rests on a foundational transaction in which the provision of peace and stability is exchanged for popular political submission (Finnstrom, 2008; Branch, 2011). This exchange produces not simply a peace dividend but a peace debt, a moral obligation imposed on the population through continual invocation of the violence that preceded 1986 (Tripp, 2010). Citizens are persistently reminded that the contemporary political order was purchased through the deaths of tens of thousands during the bush war, and that this sacrifice authorizes the regime’s continued dominance (Mamdani, 1996; Mutebi, 2019). Political dissent, within this framework, is framed not as legitimate opposition but as historical ingratitude and moral betrayal. Dissent is thus reframed not as democratic critique but as historical ingratitude, an ethical violation against the dead rather than a political disagreement with the living.
The strategic deployment of memory performs a crucial disciplinary function. By continually rehearsing the violence of the pre 1986 period, the regime constructs a temporal binary between chaos and order, positioning itself as the sole guarantor against national regression (Finnstrom, 2008). The possibility of a return to violence is presented not as hypothetical but as imminent, triggered by political pluralism itself. Elections in this case appear not as democratic routines but are framed as dangerous moments requiring exceptional control rather than as routine democratic exercises (Tripp, 2010; Branch & Mampilly, 2015). This logic explains why the NRM consistently resists characterization as a conventional political party. Instead, it defines itself as a movement, a category that signals historical necessity rather than political contingency (Kasfir, 1998). The movement form enables the NRM to collapse distinctions between party, state, and nation, rendering political opposition synonymous with national destabilization (Mamdani, 1996). As a result, alternation of power is constructed not as democratic renewal but as an existential threat to the post war political order.
Institutionally, this fusion is sustained through the deep entanglement of the NRM, the state bureaucracy, and the military. Scholars describe this configuration as a trinitarian structure in which President Museveni, the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF), and the ruling movement (NRM) operate as mutually reinforcing pillars of power (Khisa, 2019). The military here is not merely a coercive instrument but the vanguard of the movement itself, a point emphasized by Kasozi (1994). Kasozi (1994) argues that the military in Uganda should not be understood as a neutral, professional institution subordinate to civilian authority. Instead, he shows that armed forces repeatedly emerged as political actors embedded within ruling coalitions, advancing the ideological and organizational interests of those in power rather than serving the state as an autonomous institution. Museveni’s personalized control over the military, maintained through patronage networks, ethnic balancing, and direct intervention in command structures, ensures that loyalty to the armed forces is inseparable from loyalty to the regime and its revolutionary narrative (Khisa, 2019). The military is not deployed merely as a neutral security apparatus but functions as a performative agent, publicly reaffirming the state’s origins in armed conquest (Branch & Mampilly, 2015).
The symbolic apex of this mnemonic politics was President Museveni’s so-called “Trek” during the 2021 campaign, a six-day march retracing the guerrilla route through the Luwero Triangle (Opondo, 2020). This was not a campaign stunt but a deliberate ritual performance of memory. By physically reenacting the guerrilla struggle, Museveni collapsed historical time, making the liberation war present and authoritative (Thaler, 2021). This performance was directed at a demographic reality of approximately 75% of Uganda’s population that was born after 1986. For this generation, the liberation war exists only as narrative. The trek transformed that narrative into embodied spectacle, reminding young voters that the stability they inhabit is framed as a gift purchased through blood and therefore a debt owed through obedience (Finnstrom, 2008).
Elections thus become theaters of remembrance in which the state rehearses its founding violence and reasserts the moral authority of sacrifice (Branch, 2011; Branch & Mampilly, 2015). The coercive management of elections does not contradict the regime’s self representation as a guarantor of stability, rather it confirms it. By invoking the bloodshed of 1986, the state converts repression into moral duty and political opposition into an existential threat. Security Minister Elly Tumwine’s declaration that security forces had a right to shoot and kill citizens if they reached a certain level of violence was not simply policy rhetoric. It was a ritual invocation of what may be termed as the liberator’s prerogative claim that those who brought peace retain the authority to decide when life may be taken (Otunnu, 2016; Human Rights Watch, 2021). In this frame the killings of November 2020 were not narrated as state crimes but as sacrificial acts necessary to defend the liberation order. Victims were symbolically transformed into offerings made in the name of continuity. As Otunnu (2016) documents the Ugandan state has historically relied on spectacular violence to remind citizens of the consequences of dissent. The November 18 and 19 2020 massacre in these lenses functioned as a performative declaration that the state was willing to go to war against its own population to preserve the order established in 1986.
Lomnitz (2005) argues that modern states derive legitimacy not only from law but from their ability to manage death and frame sacrifice as necessary for collective survival. Death becomes meaningful only insofar as it preserves order. This sacrificial logic was evident in official responses to the 2021 violence which consistently framed killings as regrettable but necessary to prevent chaos (Human Rights Watch, 2021; Amnesty International, 2021). This logic culminates in what can be conceptualized as “commemorative war.” The Bush War is commemorative because it draws legitimacy from a specific historical script of the peace of 1986, and it is a war because it deploys the same logic of pacification conquest and enemy construction that characterized the original insurgency (Kasozi, 1994; Mamdani, 1983). This explains why during the 2021 cycle the opposition was treated not as competitors but as insurgents. As Mbembe (2003) argues sovereignty ultimately resides in the power to decide who may live and who must die.
In this way, the guerrilla myth functions not simply as a narrative of the past but as an active technology of governance. It structures how legitimacy is claimed, how dissent is delegitimized, and how political time is organized around a single moment of revolutionary victory. The blood of the bush war is thus kept politically active, circulating as a permanent claim on obedience and as the ultimate justification for the NRM’s enduring hold on power. In this lens, the Ugandan elections have become what can be termed theatre of remembrance where the state does not simply compete for votes but rehearses its foundational violence. However, this myth is facing a generational crisis. For the “Bazukulu” (the grandchildren/youth) who did not experience the 1980s, the “Blood Debt” feels like an ancestral burden they never signed up for. As the memory of 1986 fades, the NRM is increasingly forced to rely on the coercive side, making the act of repression appear not as a “protection of peace” but as a desperate attempt to preserve a revolution that has long since become the establishment.
Elections as Ritual Memory Performance and Political Legitimacy
To conceptualize elections as ritual is to locate electoral processes within a broader field of practices through which political authority, collective memory, and social order are produced, reproduced, and disciplined. Scholarship on ritual performance and political legitimacy has long demonstrated that modern state power operates not only through institutions and legal procedures but also through repetitive symbolic and embodied practices that exceed their formal democratic purposes. As Geertz (1980) and Kertzer (1988) argue, political rituals are central to the construction of sovereignty precisely because they make power visible, sensible, and morally intelligible. Viewed through this lens, elections function not simply as mechanisms for aggregating preferences but as ritualized performances through which the state remembers itself, reenacts its founding authority, and legitimizes its continued capacity to govern.
In political sociology and anthropology, ritual is understood not as symbolic excess but as a structured, repetitive practice through which authority is produced, normalized, and rendered legitimate. Connerton (1989) argues that in addition to using texts, archives, and official narratives, societies also incorporate repetitive, bodily, and ceremonial actions that inscribe memory into everyday social life. This implies rituals do not merely reflect power relations; they actively constitute them.
In Uganda, elections function as the most significant ritual of the postcolonial state. Rather than operating as neutral mechanisms for aggregating popular will, elections are ritualized performances through which sovereignty is publicly staged, contested, and ultimately reasserted through calibrated coercion (Schedler 2013; Khisa 2019). This perspective challenges procedural and liberal democratic accounts that define elections primarily as mechanisms of representation or accountability (Schumpeter, 1942; Dahl, 1971). In Uganda, elections are not simply about the “counting of heads” but about the display of force and the reaffirmation of political hierarchy. As Mahmood Mamdani (1996) demonstrates in his analysis of colonial and postcolonial governance in Africa, state power is usually exercised through what he terms the “spectacle of the law,” where legality and violence operate in tandem. The postcolonial state does not rule despite coercion but through its careful authorization and public performance. One of the most prominent public performance occasions when this combination of lawfulness and power is used is during elections.
Ritual theory provides a crucial analytical lens for understanding why electoral violence in Uganda is recurrent, patterned, and widely anticipated rather than anomalous. Ritual theory emphasizes repetition, symbolism, and embodied practice as mechanisms through which political authority is reproduced. Clifford Geertz (1980) argues that political rituals do not merely reflect power but make it imaginable and emotionally resonant. As Catherine Bell (1992) argues, ritualization is a strategic mode of action that differentiates certain practices as authoritative and natural, thereby masking relations of domination. Violence, when embedded within ritual cycles, becomes intelligible, predictable, and normalized. Elections, as temporally bounded and symbolically charged events, suspend ordinary political routines and generate moments of heightened uncertainty. It is precisely this uncertainty that necessitates ritualized coercion to stabilize authority. Elections, viewed through this lens, are not neutral administrative events but temporally bounded performances saturated with danger, symbolism, and control.
This dynamic was especially pronounced during the 2021 electoral cycle. The violence surrounding the 2021 election was not merely instrumental repression aimed at neutralizing opposition but a form of sacralised violence that drew legitimacy from the memory of the 1981 to 1986 Bush War. Finnstrom (2008) shows that the National Resistance Movement constructed a moral cosmology in which the pre-1986 period is framed as darkness, chaos, and moral decay while the post-1986 era is narrated as fragile peace secured through sacrifice. This narrative produces what Finnstrom (2008) terms a violent peace, one that must be constantly defended through force. Elections provide the ritual occasion for this defence, acting as a political resource mobilized to authorize present forms of rule.
Jeffrey C Alexander’s theory of cultural performance further deepens this analysis. For Alexander (2004; 2011), political authority is sustained through performances that convince audiences of their authenticity and moral rightness. These performances depend on coherent scripts, credible actors, symbolic staging, and deep cultural resonance. Elections are among the most consequential of such performances. They stage the state as lawful, democratic, and sovereign even when violence underwrites the performance (Alexander, 2011; Kertzer, 1988). In Uganda, the sacralization of the Bush War during electoral periods transforms the NRM’s monopoly on violence from a legal mandate into a moral one. Challenges to the regime are framed not as political disagreement but as sacrilege, as attempts to return the country to the dark days of Obote and Amin (Lindemann, 2011; Kasozi, 1994 Khisa, 2019). During the 2021 campaign, the state repeatedly framed the National Unity Platform as hooligans, foreign agents, and enemies of peace (Human Rights Watch, 2021). This discursive strategy dangerized the opposition by linking it to historical moments of collapse and disorder. It activated what Bigo (2002) describes as a politics of security, in which exceptional violence is justified as preemptive defense.
Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) theory of rites of passage is particularly useful for analyzing elections as structured political rituals. Van Gennep identifies three sequential stages in ritual processes: separation, liminality, and reincorporation. During the separation period, ordinary structures are suspended; during the liminality stage, social hierarchies are destabilized; and during reincorporation, order is restored and authority reaffirmed (Van Gennep; 1960). Ugandan elections map closely onto this Van Gennep tripartite structure, revealing a predictable choreography of militarization and repression. Campaign periods initiate separation from routine governance, election day produces an intense liminal moment of uncertainty, and the post-election period restores order through repression and consolidation. Violence, in this lens, is the means through which the ritual is completed.
The pre-election period corresponds to Van Gennep’s stage of separation and is marked by preventive and pre-emptive violence aimed at enclosing the political arena before open contestation occurs. In Uganda, this phase is characterized by the systematic deployment of administrative, legal, and surveillance-based coercion (Khisa, 2019). This takes the form of anticipatory repression, where coercion is deployed not in response to disorder but to prevent the possibility of political mobilization (Davenport, 2007). In the lead-up to the 2021 elections, the state made extensive use of the Public Order Management Act (POMA) to restrict opposition rallies, arrest campaign coordinators, and criminalize assembly (Human Rights Watch, 2021; Amnesty International, 2021). Bank accounts of NGOs, including the National NGO Forum and UWONET, were frozen in 2020, crippling election monitoring and civic education efforts (Human Rights Watch, 2020). Under the banner of “scientific elections,” public health regulations were selectively enforced to prohibit opposition mobilization while allowing ruling-party activities to proceed (Tripp, 2022).
Prior to the January 2021 general elections, the National Unity Platform (NUP) faced repeated raids on its headquarters in Kamwokya, confiscation of campaign materials such as red berets, and the targeted arrest of local coordinators and mobilizers (Nyanzi, 2021; Human Rights Watch, 2021). Similar tactics were observed in earlier cycles, including the 2011 Walk to Work protests and the 2016 arrests of opposition agents before polling day (Tripp, 2010; Branch and Mampilly, 2015). In these lenses, the separation phase thus establishes the boundaries of the electoral ritual, signalling that while an election would take place, its outcomes are already heavily circumscribed. By defining the bounds of acceptable political activity and indicating that even though an election would occur, the parameters of possibility were already under sovereign control. As Michel Foucault (2007) notes, such practices do not suspend legality but multiply it, rendering coercion rational, bureaucratic, and morally justified.
The election period itself constitutes what Van Gennep (1960) calls the liminal phase of the ritual, a moment of heightened uncertainty in which political authority must be dramatically reasserted. Victor Turner (1969) emphasizes that liminality is dangerous precisely because it destabilizes hierarchy and opens space for alternative political futures. Violence in such moments functions not as chaos but as containment. In Uganda, this danger is managed through spectacular and highly visible violence. Alexander (2011) argues that states respond to moments of crisis by staging performances of authority that rely on symbolism, emotion, and spectacle. During the 2021 electoral cycle, urban centres, particularly Kampala, were saturated with military hardware, including armoured personnel carriers (popularly known as “Mambas”), elite Special Forces Command (SFC) units, and heavily armed police (Oola, 2021; Ssempala, 2021).
The November 18-19, 2020 killings of over fifty civilians by security forces during protests following the arrest of opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi (Bobi Wine) represented the apex of this liminal spectacle. These killings were not spontaneous breakdowns of order but carefully staged demonstrations of sovereign power. As Jeffrey Alexander (2011) argues, states rely on “cultural performances” to make authority visible and emotionally compelling. The public nature of this violence served a pedagogical function, teaching citizens, particularly urban youth, that the liminal promise of political change would be met with overwhelming force. Polling stations surrounded by armed personnel transformed voting into a monitored ritual of submission, reinforcing what Mbembe (2001) describes as the postcolonial state’s command over bodies and space.
Following the declaration of election results, the ritual enters the stage of reincorporation, during which order is restored through targeted and often clandestine repression. The final stage of the ritual corresponds to reincorporation, where order is restored, and dissent is neutralized (Van Gennep, 1960). Post-election violence in Uganda typically shifts from spectacle to secrecy. In Uganda, this phase is characterized by targeted, clandestine repression. Following the announcement of the 2021 election results, Hundreds of opposition supporters were abducted in unmarked Toyota Hiace vans commonly referred to as “drones” and detained in unofficial “safe houses,” where torture and ill-treatment were widely reported (Amnesty International, 2021; Human Rights Initiative Uganda, 2021). This post-election violence, therefore, functioned as a form of political cleansing, removing the residual contagion of dissent produced during the liminal phase, exhausting the social energy generated during the campaign period. This implies that reincorporation does not entail reconciliation or democratic closure but enforced stability. As Bell (1992) argues, rituals conclude by reestablishing difference and hierarchy. In Uganda, post-election repression folds society back into a normalized authoritarian order, narrated by the regime as peace and stability (Khisa, 2019). Fear generated through disappearances and prosecutions produces anticipatory compliance discouraging future mobilization. Therefore, the danger of transformation was resolved through coercive reincorporation.
The power of this electoral ritual lies in its repetition. As Turner (1969) suggests, ritual repetition stabilizes social systems. The same three-phase structure, preventive enclosure, liminal spectacle, and post-election cleansing has been observed across Uganda’s elections in 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021. Through repetition, violence becomes procedural rather than exceptional, embedded within the routine management of political competition. Citizens anticipate repression and adjust their behaviour accordingly, internalizing fear as a form of political discipline. Over time, this produces what can be described as a cyclical memory of elections, in which repression is anticipated as a seasonal and predictable feature of political life (Schedler 2013; Mamdani 1996; Khisa 2019). Citizens adjust their behaviour through self-censorship, political withdrawal, and strategic silence (Scott, 1990). Declining urban turnout, the increasing reliance of opposition actors on exile or judicial avenues, and the normalization of military presence during elections all reflect this adaptation (Afrobarometer, 2022; Tripp, 2022). The state’s authority is reaffirmed not because it is trusted, but because it is consistently dominant.
Ugandan elections, therefore, follow a predictable ritual structure. Before elections, the state engages in preventive and pre-emptive violence: arrests, surveillance, and restrictions on opposition mobilization. During elections, violence becomes highly visible and spectacular through militarized deployments and public display of force. After elections, repression often intensifies in what many observers describe as political “cleansing,” as the state reincorporates society into a stabilized order. This repetition transforms violence into expectation. Citizens do not experience electoral violence as shocking but as procedural. The 2021 general election therefore, was not a rupture in Uganda’s political order but its most refined expression, a disciplined, routinized rehearsal of conquest. Electoral violence in Uganda is therefore best understood as a ritualized process through which the state manages liminality, disciplines dissent, and continually reasserts its right to rule. Through ritual repetition, the state renews its legitimacy not by persuading citizens but by reminding them of its capacity to conquer.
Elections as Theatres of Remembrance and the Commemorative War
The 2021 elections became a commemorative war not because the Ugandan state invents new enemies, but because it repeatedly reactivates the liberation moral universe through which the NRM originally legitimized its seizure of power. This claim rests on the observation that electoral competition in Uganda is persistently narrated through the idioms, hierarchies, and moral claims of the 1981-1986 armed struggle, rather than through democratic principles of choice and accountability. President Museveni has consistently framed political authority as deriving from armed struggle, most explicitly in Sowing the Mustard Seed (1997), where he argues that the right to rule flows from having defeated forces that “were killing Ugandans.” During successive election cycles, this narrative is redeployed to recode political competition as a threat to peace rather than a democratic contest (Finnstrom 2008; Khisa 2019). Elections therefore, function as memory performances of state power. To move beyond the limitations of transitology and proceduralism, Ugandan elections can be understood as a theatre. In this theatre of the gun, violence is not disruption but the script.
In this commemorative framing, contemporary dissent is symbolically collapsed into past insurgency. Opposition mobilization is discursively aligned with armed rebellion through repeated invocations of insecurity and national survival, particularly during the 2016 and 2021 elections when opposition rallies were framed as security threats rather than political activity (Human Rights Watch 2021). This rhetoric echoes earlier constructions of existential enemies such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, effectively erasing the distinction between democratic opposition and violent insurgency (Finnstrom 2008). This collapse is not accidental. Mamdani (2001) argues that the postcolonial states sustain political authority through the construction of an internal enemy, transforming political opposition into a security threat. In Uganda, this enemy is periodically reactivated during elections, framing opposition supporters and urban youths as dangerous actors requiring coercive control.
When Museveni and senior NRM officials speak from campaign platforms about having “fought for” and “defended” the country, they are not merely recounting history but performing legitimacy. These utterances function as performative speech acts in Austin’s (1962) sense, enacting authority by invoking sacrifice and victory. Drawing on Austin’s (1962) theory of performative speech, when Museveni declares that the NRM “brought peace” or “defended the country,” he is not simply recounting past events. He is actively claiming moral ownership of the state, reasserting the conditionality of citizenship, and reproducing political authority without reference to electoral consent. As Finnstrom (2008), Mamdani (2001), and Reid (2017) argue, such speech acts do political work as they transform authority into something earned through sacrifice and violence rather than granted through popular mandate. This aligns with Weber’s concept of charismatic legitimacy but extends it into a militarized moral economy in which violence, rather than consent, becomes the primary credential for rule (Weber 1978; Finnstrom 2008). Voting is thus reframed not as an evaluative act but as a moral obligation to repay a historical debt. As Finnstrom (2008) shows, the NRM has consistently framed peace as an achievement that must be protected rather than a condition that can be questioned. The electorate is positioned as a population always on the brink of losing stability and therefore required to express gratitude through political compliance rather than critique. This logic ensures that elections do not function as moments of accountability but as acts of reaffirmation. This collapses protest into insurgency logic, treating civilian political activity as a precursor to disorder and violence. The effect is to symbolically refight the liberation war by reclassifying contemporary dissent as an existential threat to the nation.
Elections, in this framing, do not represent democratic uncertainty but a moment of existential risk in which the achievements of the liberation struggle could be undone. Analyses of Museveni’s 2016 and 2021 campaign speeches show that Museveni repeatedly contrasts the NRM’s “fighters” with opposition leaders who “did not participate in the struggle,” framing the latter not simply as political rivals but as morally and historically unqualified to govern (Khisa 2019). In this discourse, electoral competition is recoded as a test of loyalty to the liberation legacy rather than a contest over policy or governance. Opposition politics thus appear not as legitimate disagreement but as a deviation from the moral order established by the war.
Even when not named explicitly, the spectre of northern insurgency, particularly the figure of Joseph Kony, continued to haunt electoral discourse. Scholars note that references to insecurity, rebellion, and the dangers of disorder in Uganda routinely invoke the memory of the Lord’s Resistance Army, allowing the state to collapse contemporary dissent into the category of armed rebellion (Finnstrom 2008; Mamdani 2001). This implicit invocation was reinforced during the 2020 to 2021 campaign period when opposition rallies were framed by state authorities as security threats rather than political activity, justifying military deployment and mass arrests under the logic of counterinsurgency rather than public order management (Human Rights Watch 2021; Amnesty International 2021).
The asymmetry between the invocation of past violence and the erasure of present victims directs attention to the commemorative logic underlying electoral repression. If elections function as commemoration, the critical question becomes, what and who exactly is being commemorated? Empirically and structurally, electoral violence in Uganda does not commemorate victims; it commemorates power. State-sanctioned commemorative practices in Uganda do not centre victims of electoral violence. There are no national days of mourning for those killed during elections, no official memorials, and no truth or accountability mechanisms addressing election-related killings. Victims of the November 2020 violence, in which dozens were killed by security forces, were not publicly named, honoured, or remembered by the state. Instead, their deaths were minimized, rationalized, or erased through official discourse that framed killings as unfortunate but necessary responses to disorder (Human Rights Watch 2021; Amnesty International 2021). As Verdery (1999) argues, commemoration is always selective, and silence itself constitutes a political act that reveals whose lives are deemed worthy of remembrance.
The Ugandan state formally commemorates military power rather than civilian loss. This is most clearly institutionalized through Tarehe Sita, observed annually on 6 February to mark the launch of the National Resistance Army’s Bush War in 1981. Tarehe Sita commemorates armed struggle, sacrifice, and military victory, celebrating those who fought as the moral founders of the state. This commemoration does not mourn civilian loss, it celebrates armed struggle, sacrifice, and victory. Official ceremonies, speeches, and military parades emphasize discipline, heroism, and the salvational role of violence, while civilian suffering during both the liberation war and subsequent state violence is notably absent from the commemorative frame (Museveni 1997; Finnstrom 2008).
Electoral violence therefore functions as commemoration not of loss but of capacity. It commemorates the state’s demonstrated ability to kill, discipline, and control. The bodies of victims become sites of inscription rather than objects of mourning, serving as warnings to the wider population. The November 18-19, 2020, protests, many of whom were shot by security forces, deaths were not followed by public acknowledgment, memorialization, or judicial reckoning. Instead, officials publicly defended the security forces and warned against future protests, transforming the victims into cautionary symbols rather than mourned citizens (Human Rights Watch 2021). This aligns with Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics, in which sovereign power is exercised through deciding not only who may live or die, but which deaths matter. Peace is therefore not a settled condition but a debt continually extracted through fear, compliance, and periodic bloodshed.
Elections, therefore, commemorate the continuing capacity of the state to enforce obedience through lethal force, renewing the moral hierarchy established during the liberation war and replaying it on the bodies of citizens. This renews regime legitimacy by reminding the population that authority rests on superior violence rather than electoral approval (Mamdani 1996; Mbembe 2001). Second, it disciplines the future by reactivating the trauma of past wars; the state narrows the range of imaginable political alternatives. As Berlant (2011) suggests, affective governance operates by shaping what futures feel possible. Third, it normalizes coercion in the way that the language of peace, security, and stability reframes repression as civic duty rather than state abuse (Tripp 2010). And lastly, it publicly verifies hierarchy following Foucault’s (1977) argument that ritualized violence makes power visible by staging the asymmetry between those who wield force and those who are subjected to it. In these lenses, the state does not need to invent new threats because the liberation moral universe already provides a ready-made grammar through which dissent can be recoded as danger, competition as betrayal, and voting as a test of gratitude rather than a mechanism of accountability.
Technologies of Subjection: The Red Beret, the Drone, and the Digital Blackout in Uganda’s 2021 Elections
The Red Beret
The red beret, adopted by the People Power movement and later institutionalized by the National Unity Platform, emerged as a highly charged political symbol whose power lay precisely in its capacity to condense history, memory, and legitimacy into a visible and embodied form.
By adopting the red beret, the opposition did not simply create a recognizable aesthetic. It invoked the grammar of revolutionary legitimacy that had been carefully monopolized by the National Resistance Movement since 1986. Since in the Ugandan political imagination, the liberation struggle occupies a privileged moral position, functioning as the origin story of the state itself (Mamdani 1996; Finnstrom 2008), the red beret, therefore threatened this monopoly by suggesting that the language of sacrifice, resistance, and national salvation could be reclaimed by a new generation, many of whom had not lived experience of the Bush War but sought to reinterpret its meaning.
The state’s response was immediate and deliberate. The state’s aggressive response to the beret reveals a sophisticated awareness of the political force embedded in visual and performative identity. In September 2019, red berets were formally gazetted as part of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces’ official military attire, rendering their civilian possession a criminal offense under the UPDF Act (Al Jazeera, 2019). This criminalization reveals how the red beret became a site of struggle over embodied allegiance. Wearing the beret exposed individuals to arrest, harassment, and physical violence, producing a political environment in which identity itself became dangerous (Al Jazeera, 2019).
This legal move transformed a political symbol into a security object, collapsing opposition identity into military impersonation. On March 12, 2021, for example, National Unity Platform member James Mubiru was arrested and charged in a military court solely for wearing a red beret, despite no evidence of arms or insurgent activity (Human Rights Watch 2021; Amnesty International 2021). Through this manoeuvre, the state did not merely ban an item of clothing; it reasserted exclusive ownership over the symbols of liberation. The act of dressing was recoded as an act of rebellion. In this sense, the beret ceased to be a symbol alone and became a bodily challenge to the NRM’s claim that revolutionary legitimacy and moral authority remained its exclusive preserve. The opposition’s visual politics thus disrupted what Mamdani (1996) describes as the postcolonial state’s effort to freeze history, preserving liberation credentials as permanent entitlement rather than as a contested legacy.
The state’s policing of the red beret illustrates a core mechanism of what Bourdieu (1991) terms symbolic violence, the power to define not only social hierarchies but the boundaries of legitimate political expression. The red beret functioned as more than a marker of opposition affiliation but also a performative threat to the state’s monopoly on legitimacy. By criminalizing a symbol associated with dissent, the state structured public perception itself, recasting opposition not as political disagreement but as unlawful imitation of sovereign authority. Every arrest, military trial, and public denunciation of beret wearers operated as a ritual of subjection, signalling that revolutionary aesthetics belonged to the state alone. These rituals echoed older practices in which the postcolonial state policed not only behaviour but meaning, disciplining how citizens could imagine themselves politically (Foucault 1977; Mbembe 2001). Control over memory, identity, and participation was thus exercised simultaneously through law, force, and symbolism
By regulating revolutionary aesthetics, the state extended its reach into the realm of political imagination. Citizens were warned not only against opposing the regime but against looking like revolutionaries. In doing so, the NRM reinforced a hierarchy in which historical legitimacy was inseparable from political loyalty, and dissent could never claim the moral authority of resistance. The red beret controversy thus exposes a deeper struggle over memory and futurity: whether the liberation past could be reinterpreted as a resource for democratic renewal, or whether it would remain frozen as the exclusive moral capital of those already in power.
Drones: The Physical Theatre of Disappearance and the Policing of the Body
If the red beret disciplined the symbolic and visual dimensions of opposition identity, the so-called “drones,” unmarked Toyota Hiace vans widely used during the 2020-2021 electoral period, enforced obedience at the corporeal level. Operated by units linked to the Special Forces Command (SFC) and the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), these vehicles became the primary infrastructure through which political dissent was rendered physically vulnerable. Human rights organizations documented hundreds of abductions of National Unity Platform supporters from urban neighbourhoods, roadside checkpoints, and rural trading centers, followed by detention in unofficial facilities and systematic torture (Human Rights Watch, 2021; Amnesty International, 2021).
The drone phenomenon is a technological update of an established Ugandan repertoire of rule. During the 1970s and early 1980s, under the regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, “Panda Gari” operations became synonymous with arbitrary state power. Citizens were seized from streets and marketplaces by unmarked vehicles and transported to military barracks or the State Research Bureau at Nakasero, where many were never seen again (Mutibwa, 1992; Otunnu, 2016). The fear that anyone could be abducted at any moment, often without formal charges or acknowledgment, produced what Otunnu (2016) describes as a condition of generalized political paralysis.
The 2021 drone resurrected this theatre of fear almost verbatim. Like the State Research Bureau’s vehicles, the vans operated outside the visible legal process, delivering detainees to “safe houses” rather than gazetted detention centres. Survivors reported being held in facilities run by military intelligence units, including locations associated with the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence and the Special Investigations Unit in Kireka, where access to lawyers, family members, and courts was systematically denied (Amnesty International, 2021). The objective was not simply to remove activists from circulation but to perform what might be called a vanishing act, reminding the public of the state’s historical capacity to erase bodies both physically and politically. This continuity matters. It demonstrates that Uganda’s postcolonial state has not abandoned earlier techniques of domination but has accumulated and refined them, layering old practices beneath a discourse of stability and constitutional order. As Mamdani (1996) argues, the postcolonial state often governs through the selective reactivation of colonial and authoritarian methods, deploying them episodically when consent falters. The 2021 election cycle functioned as such a moment of reactivation, transforming elections into commemorative rituals that reaffirmed the durability of coercive power.
What distinguishes the drone from conventional policing is not only its violence but its mode of appearance. The vans were unmarked, lacked license plates, and were operated by masked or plainclothes operatives, producing uncertainty about the identity of the captor and the legal status of the detention (Human Rights Watch, 2022). Abductions were conducted in broad daylight, often in full view of neighbors and passersby. Masked operatives and heavily armed escorts ensured that the act of disappearance was seen, remembered, and circulated. This aligns with Foucault’s (1977) insight that punishment operates not only through discipline but through spectacle, producing obedience by making power visible and unpredictable. In this sense, the drone was not merely a vehicle but a mnemonic device, embedding historical terror into contemporary urban space. As Finnstrom (2008) argues, fear in Uganda has historically been generated not through constant killing but through the uncertainty of who might be taken, where, and by whom. The drone thus functioned as a mobile architecture of disappearance, designed to make political participation feel existentially risky rather than merely illegal.
The death of Fabian Luuka illustrates the ritualized character of this violence. Luuka, a NUP supporter arrested at a checkpoint for carrying a party membership card, died after severe torture while in military detention. Postmortem examinations and eyewitness accounts documented electrocution, burn marks, and extensive tissue damage before his body was abandoned in a public space (Human Rights Watch, 2021). This was not violence oriented toward intelligence extraction. It was exemplary violence, intended to circulate as rumour, image, and warning. As Mbembe (2003) emphasizes, necropolitical power operates not only through killing but through the public calibration of fear, determining which bodies may be violated with impunity and which deaths will be rendered politically meaningless.
By reactivating memories of past political violence, the drones collapsed contemporary opposition into the long genealogy of insurgency and subversion. Urban streets, taxi stages, and village paths became ritualized sites of obedience, where the possibility of disappearance hovered alongside the routine act of political mobilization. Together with the policing of symbols such as the red beret, the drones reveal a regime that governs simultaneously at the level of meaning and flesh. As the symbols were criminalized to discipline imagination, bodies were abducted to discipline participation. The convergence of these techniques demonstrates that electoral violence in Uganda is not episodic excess but a structured performance of power, one that survives by making fear durable, memory selective, and citizenship conditional.
Digital Blackout: Virtual Erasure and the Control of Communication
The nationwide internet shutdown and social media blackout imposed on the eve of the 2021 elections extended the architecture of repression into the digital realm. As documented by NetBlocks and Access Now, Uganda experienced a near total disruption of internet connectivity and the blocking of major social media platforms beginning on 13 January 2021, just hours before polling day (NetBlocks, 2021; Access Now, 2021). This intervention constituted a deliberate strategy of virtual erasure, aimed at disabling the opposition’s capacity to communicate, organize, and document events in real time.
The blackout must therefore be understood not merely as censorship, but as a modern form of disappearance. Whereas the drones removed bodies from public space, the shutdown removed voices from the public sphere. Opposition activists could not livestream arrests, coordinate responses to violence, or circulate evidence of abuse. Election observers were rendered spectators without sight. By silencing the digital public, the state ensured that its rituals of coercion unfolded beyond immediate scrutiny, allowing official narratives of “peace,” “order,” and “stability” to circulate uncontested (Human Rights Watch, 2021; Tripp, 2010). Importantly, this blackout foreclosed real time mourning. Victims of election related violence could not be named, honoured, or collectively acknowledged as events unfolded. The nation was denied the ability to grieve publicly. As Verdery (1999) argues, silence is itself a political act, one that determines whose suffering enters history and whose disappears. Digital omission thus became a form of violence that operates through denial rather than force, preventing victims from emerging as political subjects.
In this sense, the blackout represented a new modality of symbolic and structural violence. It functioned as a digital analogue to the physical safe house. Just as detainees held in unofficial facilities are removed from legal visibility, society itself was temporarily removed from communicative visibility. Citizens were made acutely aware that not only their bodies but their digital footprints could be monitored, suspended, or criminalized. This produced anticipatory fear, a condition in which compliance is internalized because the boundaries of permissible expression are both opaque and shifting (Foucault, 1977).
Crucially, the blackout intervened in the production of political memory. By selectively curtailing access to social media and messaging platforms, the state controlled not only the circulation of information in the present but the archiving of political experience for the future. Videos, testimonies, and contemporaneous accounts that might later ground claims of accountability were never produced or were rendered invisible. As Connerton (1989) argues, collective memory depends on material and institutional supports of transmission. The blackout removed these supports at a critical historical moment, shaping what could later be remembered and narrated as political truth.
The blackout also amplified the affective power of physical repression. When citizens observed drones on the streets while simultaneously losing access to communication platforms, fear was intensified through isolation. Individuals could not verify the experiences of others, appeal to national or international audiences, or construct shared narratives of what was unfolding. As Finnstrom (2008) shows in the context of northern Uganda, fear becomes most effective when social knowledge is fragmented. The 2021 blackout reproduced this condition at a national scale, transforming the election into what might be described as a political darkroom, a space in which state power could be exercised without a witnessing public.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the central objective of the ritualized violence surrounding Uganda’s 2021 election was not simply to suppress opposition, but to produce and circulate fear as a durable mode of governance. This fear was neither accidental nor episodic, but was strategically cultivated through propaganda, selective repression, and mass intimidation to shape political behaviour and consolidate continuity. By framing opposition politics as a threat to national security and to the peace allegedly secured by the National Resistance Movement, the state externalized elite anxieties and diffused them across society. Recurrent warnings about the dangers of “untested leadership” and a return to past chaos mobilized historical memory as a psychological resource, reactivating older traumas to discipline present choice.
This politics of fear did not eliminate participation but reorganized it, making elections moments in which abstention, silence, and restraint emerged as rational responses to anticipated violence. Fear thus functioned as a mode of political engagement, shaping how citizens moved, spoke, assembled, and voted. In this sense, electoral violence in Uganda exemplifies Foucault’s (1977) insight that power is productive rather than merely repressive. Violence produced disciplined subjects who internalized the boundaries of permissible politics (Foucault, 1977). Because coercion was embedded within legal frameworks, security mandates, public health regulations, and constitutional rhetoric, it appeared legitimate rather than exceptional.
What is striking about the 2021 election cycle is not the invention of new forms of violence, but the consolidation and normalization of existing ones. Physical brutality, symbolic intimidation, legal exclusion, and moral coercion converged most visibly during the electoral period, making elections potent sites of remembrance. Violence became expected, anticipated, and rationalized as an ordinary feature of political participation. Citizens approached elections not only with hope or scepticism, but with an understanding that coercion was intrinsic to the process. Seen through this lens, electoral violence in Uganda functions as political commemoration. It recalls past wars, insurgencies, and struggles for power not through monuments, anniversaries, or truth commissions, but through repeated practices of discipline and control. Elections bind the present to the past by reenacting historical scripts of domination on contemporary bodies. Rather than closing chapters of conflict, the electoral process keeps them open, replayed and reauthorized in each cycle of contestation.
Elections in Uganda do not suspend violence; they institutionalize it. Through electoral procedures, coercion is rendered routine, fear is reorganized as a mode of participation, and state force is recast as democratic legitimacy. Violence thus becomes an archive in practice, a living medium through which the state recalls its origins in armed struggle and projects its authority into the future. It is within this logic that the NRM’s current symbolism of “protecting the gains” acquires meaning, framing elections not as moments of accountability but as rituals for safeguarding a historically won order through continued discipline and force. In this sense, democracy in Uganda does not fail because violence intrudes upon it. Rather, violence is one of the mechanisms through which democracy is staged, managed, and controlled. Elections in this process work not as moments of renewal but as commemorative performances of power, ensuring that historical violence remains active within contemporary political life.
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