In the early twenty-first century, wars, armed conflicts and repression have
continued to affect post-colonial Africa. So too, have militarized regional
peacekeeping or peace enforcement responses. This article highlights the
role of African state agency and seeks to answer two questions: what has been
the role of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) in regional ordering
and relation to liberal peacekeeping over the past two decades? And which
ideational and material forces have shaped the mode of regional UPDF
intervention and hence their regional influence? It examines the historicity
of the regional politics of intervention in Eastern Africa with a specific focus
on Uganda. This adds both conceptual insights, as well as a deeper
understanding of regional enduring patterns. The article finds that
historically, Ugandan relations and modes of armed intervention can be
situatedwithin the ‘Dar es Salaam School’ of thought, a specific anti-colonial
militarist revolutionary formation inspired by Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney
and Julius Nyerere. Three defining imperatives of regional intervention can
be explained to have dominated Uganda and other African state polities for
decades, viz., 1) Fear of balkanization and tribalization as a history of civil
wars and fragmentation; 2) aspiration of national economic independence
through the continental expansion of economic markets; and 3) regional
(forced) unity, strategic essentialism (in Gayatri Spivak’s term) as a means
to counter global powers. These questions provide the foundation for
constructive critique of militarised peace interventions as warfare. The
article uses concrete Ugandan relationships between armed force and its
application in the theatres of war in Somalia, South Sudan and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to illustrate the imperatives