Carrot, stick, and statute

Abstract

Abstract The National Resistance Movement (NRM) has dominated Uganda’s political scene for almost four decades; yet, for most of this period, Kampala has refused to submit to its grip. As opposition activism in the city became increasingly explosive, the ruling elite developed a range of generative and repressive strategies that we subject to close scrutiny, focusing particularly on the decade prior to the 2021 election. We explore elite strategies pursued both from the ‘top down’ through legal manoeuvres and escalating violent coercion, and from the ‘bottom up’ through attempts to build support among urban youth and to infiltrate organizations in the urban informal sector. Efforts to engineer electoral dominance of the capital repeatedly failed, though the opposition’s capacity to force change remains highly constrained. We examine why each urban dominance strategy has produced only limited gains, arguing that together these interventions have continually reproduced a situation of intensely contested urban control.