Managing donor perceptions: Contextualizing Uganda's 2007 intervention in Somalia

Abstract

This article explores Uganda’s decision to send peacekeeping troops to Somalia in 2007 as part of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and argues that the intervention has as much to do with Uganda’s relationship with its donors as it has with maintaining regional stability – the official justification for intervention. Museveni’s decision to intervene in Somalia is the most recent example of his regime’s multipronged ‘image management’ strategy in which the President has involved Uganda in numerous foreign and domestic activities to ensure that donors perceive his government in a particular way vis-a-vis their interests: as an economic success story, a guarantor of regional stability, or, in relation to Somalia, an ally in the global war on terror. In so doing Museveni’s strategy, conceptualized here within a constructivist framework, has been able largely to avoid censure in areas of traditional donor concern such as governance, thereby achieving a considerable degree of agency in a seemingly asymmetric relationship. THOUGH UGANDAN TROOPS HAVE BEEN IN SOMALIA since early 2007 as part of the AU peacekeeping mission AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia), their presence there has received particular scrutiny since the July 2010 Kampala bombings, an act perpetrated by the Islamist Somali rebel group Al-Shabaab. Since the attacks, which killed 74 people, Ugandan journalists and politicians have increasingly questioned the motivation behind their army’s involvement in the conflict, seeking better to comprehend what they are doing in Somalia and how this will affect *Jonathan Fisher ( j.fisher@bham.ac.uk) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2010 at the UK African Studies Association conference, University of Oxford, and in 2011 at the University of Birmingham as part of an ESRCBISA Seminar Series on African Agency. I thank participants in these events and colleagues in Oxford and Birmingham for their helpful feedback. Research for the article has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; award numbers PTA-0312007-ES/F024509/1 and PTA-026-27-2861). I am also grateful to St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and to the Chester and Mellon and Cyril Foster Funds, University of Oxford for contributing to fieldwork costs. African Affairs, 00/00, 1–20 doi: 10.1093/afraf/ads023 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved 1 African Affairs Advance Access published May 9, 2012