Moral Politics, Regime Stability, and Political Violence in Uganda

Security and order are not neutral concepts, just as those responsible for maintaining them are not neutral actors. Especially in authoritarian regimes, elite, institutional, and popular understandings of the two terms are often exclusionary, selective, or discriminatory. Questions like who benefits from maintaining existing orders and security and who is seen as a threat to both are often answered along intersectional lines. Moral politics, in this regard, can be a central pillar of regime stability, with political violence by both formal and informal security and justice actors playing a crucial role in maintaining social order and enforcing moral rules. In an effort to disentangle those intersectional dynamics, the paper focusses on Uganda as a single case and asks how the violent maintenance of social and moral orders in Uganda simultaneously maintains regime stability. To answer this question, the paper relies on qualitative interviews conducted in Uganda in 2020 and 2022 with, among others, human rights lawyers, feminist, political, and LGBTQI* activists, politicians, and members of and experts on the security sector. Employing a broad understanding of political violence, the paper shows how political violence contributes to regime stability by keeping some actors in politics small while excluding others from the political arena completely, and by satisfying wide-spread beliefs about justice, order, and security and thus ensuring popular support for the regime. The contribution also sheds light on how, accordingly, experiences of political violence differ along lines of gender, sexuality, ethnic identity, socio-economic status, and religion, and outlines ways in which marginalised and victimised groups try to counter their involuntary role in the maintenance of regime stability. Through this, the paper not only provides novel empirical insights into intersectional dynamics of political violence in Uganda, but also contributes to an increased understanding of how regime stability interacts with moral politics and intersectional violence more generally.