Beyond Ethnicity: Reflections on the History and Politics of Violence in Uganda

The chapter “Beyond Ethnicity: Reflections on the History and Politics of Violence In Uganda” seeks to explore the postcolonial realities of persistent bloodbaths in Uganda. The popular argument in the existing literature emphasizes agency to explain the causes of violence. The idea here is that Ugandans are inherently violent and that the driving force behind this reality is identity, including ethnicity and religion. I argue that Uganda’s violence, including the recent bloodbath, cannot be explained outside historical and political contexts. The violence of 2014 and 2016 that involved government forces and ethnic activists have been explained from the angle of cultural differences that exist between ethnic groups of Uganda. I deploy discourse analysis to examine oral histories and archival sources to argue that these scores of violence could be better explained by focusing on the circumstances that shaped agency in ways that reproduce violence in Uganda.