TY - JOUR

T1 - HISTORICIZING UGANDA’S REGIONAL MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

T2 - STRUCTURING A REGION OF WARFARE

AU - Kaalund, Mathilde

N1 - SPECIAL ISSUE ON MILITARIZATION, GOVERNANCE AND PEACE IN UGANDA: MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - In the early twenty-first century, wars, armed conflicts and repression havecontinued to affect post-colonial Africa. So too, have militarized regionalpeacekeeping or peace enforcement responses. This article highlights therole of African state agency and seeks to answer two questions: what has beenthe role of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) in regional orderingand relation to liberal peacekeeping over the past two decades? And whichideational and material forces have shaped the mode of regional UPDFintervention and hence their regional influence? It examines the historicityof the regional politics of intervention in Eastern Africa with a specific focuson Uganda. This adds both conceptual insights, as well as a deeperunderstanding of regional enduring patterns. The article finds thathistorically, Ugandan relations and modes of armed intervention can besituatedwithin the ‘Dar es Salaam School’ of thought, a specific anti-colonialmilitarist revolutionary formation inspired by Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodneyand Julius Nyerere. Three defining imperatives of regional intervention canbe explained to have dominated Uganda and other African state polities fordecades, viz., 1) Fear of balkanization and tribalization as a history of civilwars and fragmentation; 2) aspiration of national economic independencethrough the continental expansion of economic markets; and 3) regional(forced) unity, strategic essentialism (in Gayatri Spivak’s term) as a meansto counter global powers. These questions provide the foundation forconstructive critique of militarised peace interventions as warfare. Thearticle uses concrete Ugandan relationships between armed force and itsapplication in the theatres of war in Somalia, South Sudan and theDemocratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to illustrate the imperatives

AB - In the early twenty-first century, wars, armed conflicts and repression havecontinued to affect post-colonial Africa. So too, have militarized regionalpeacekeeping or peace enforcement responses. This article highlights therole of African state agency and seeks to answer two questions: what has beenthe role of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) in regional orderingand relation to liberal peacekeeping over the past two decades? And whichideational and material forces have shaped the mode of regional UPDFintervention and hence their regional influence? It examines the historicityof the regional politics of intervention in Eastern Africa with a specific focuson Uganda. This adds both conceptual insights, as well as a deeperunderstanding of regional enduring patterns. The article finds thathistorically, Ugandan relations and modes of armed intervention can besituatedwithin the ‘Dar es Salaam School’ of thought, a specific anti-colonialmilitarist revolutionary formation inspired by Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodneyand Julius Nyerere. Three defining imperatives of regional intervention canbe explained to have dominated Uganda and other African state polities fordecades, viz., 1) Fear of balkanization and tribalization as a history of civilwars and fragmentation; 2) aspiration of national economic independencethrough the continental expansion of economic markets; and 3) regional(forced) unity, strategic essentialism (in Gayatri Spivak’s term) as a meansto counter global powers. These questions provide the foundation forconstructive critique of militarised peace interventions as warfare. Thearticle uses concrete Ugandan relationships between armed force and itsapplication in the theatres of war in Somalia, South Sudan and theDemocratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to illustrate the imperatives

M3 - Journal article

VL - 29

SP - 113

EP - 143

JO - EAST AFRICAN JOURNAL OF PEACE & HUMAN RIGHTS

JF - EAST AFRICAN JOURNAL OF PEACE & HUMAN RIGHTS

SN - 1021-8858

IS - 1

ER -