In this strand of research, I study how authoritarian states project authority in so-called ‘low-capacity’ states. It focuses on the role of unpredictability in authoritarian politics, examining how rulers can use vague mandates and provisional authority to weaken alternatives to their rule. The project includes an important inductive theory-building element, based on ongoing qualitative fieldwork in Uganda since 2014, to illuminate processes of autocratization worldwide. 

In addition to my book, Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda, I’ve published on this topic in the fields of comparative politics and international relations, development studies, and African studies. These include a recent article published in Perspectives on Politics, that finds that vigilantes are both more common where police are present, and also perceived as more helpful where police are perceived as more helpful. Rather than functioning as substitutes, vigilantes and police create a mutually reinforcing security environment. This counterintuitive finding is explained by qualitative insights – that in this context, the police and vigilantes fill different and complementary roles, with police engaged mainly in regime maintenance and vigilantes engaged in local policing. The implications are that strengthening the police will not necessarily build accountability, an important corrective to many development interventions. 

Another recent article, co-authored with Eliza Urwin, studies how rebel-incumbent political orders govern through unpredictability, establishing orders that run on vague mandates and provisional authority. The article argues that this is because rebels must establish governing institutions that are both strong enough to control society and weak enough not to threaten rebel rule. 

Other publications in this stream focus on vigilantism, militias, and community policing, how the state mobilises and demobilises youth, and how some low-capacity states govern through unpredictability. I’ve also collaborated with a Kenyan artist, Victor Ndula, to produce cartoon art of some of this work. I am developing this project to examine these dynamics over time in local authoritarian institutions, as well as what this can tell us about rebel to political party transitions. The project has been funded by various donors including the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Programme on Security, Society and the State (2019-2024), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the ESRC’s Centre for Public Authority and International Development, as well as the Morris Abrahams Foundation.

In Progress: 

“State Threats and Regime Solutions: Uganda’s Resistance Councils” 

In 1986, Uganda’s National Resistance Movement toppled Kampala after waging a five-year insurgency in the central part of the country. Suddenly, they had won a country characterised by longstanding regional and ethnic divisions, themselves shaped by British colonial strategies of divide and rule. The NRM had to administer the country—and quickly, lest resistance to its rule foment and gain traction. For decades, Uganda’s administrative structure had been hewed to the interests of a different ruling party- Milton Obote’s UPC. Though nominally apolitical, the NRM did not know where it would encounter resistance, and what form it might take. This paper examines several strategies the NRM used to counter and reform the local administrative state in the late 1980s immediately after taking power, highlighting how it formed a novel system of “resistance councils” that in fact reproduced pre-existing administrative structures but created a process of “fire and re-hire” under the new regime. Using a process of local selection through public elections enrolled the civilian population in producing a new NRM administrative state that merged political and administrative responsibilities to help produce the new regime’s authority in villages across the country. Additionally, while RCs were locally-selected, in key strategic regions, the NRM played a more proactive role to ensure proactive cooperation. This article extends work by Mai Hassan on the administrative state, work on authoritarian resilience, and scholarship on rebel-to-party transitions. 

“Authoritarian arbitrage: Legal authoritarianism in the world’s less powerful and lower-capacity states” 

Many of today’s authoritarians pursue illiberal ends using rule of law compliant means. Much of the research on how authoritarians use law has been based on comparatively highly capacitated authoritarian states, including Russia, China, Hungary and Poland. These states seek to extend their control and enact illiberal political agendas, both domestically—for instance using law to narrow the space for political opposition and bolster the advantage of incumbency, and internationally—for instance by strengthening sovereign claims and undermining human rights norms. With a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and especially Uganda, this article examines how authoritarians use law in lower-capacity states to make an empirical and analytic contribution to this emerging scholarship. Lower-capacity states may lack the ability to pursue authoritarian interests directly, instead adopting strategies that indirectly weaken the rule of law. For instance, in addition to subverting law, some authoritarians destabilize jurisdictional claims, thereby making it uncertain when a given institution will be the relevant legal authority. Additionally, the line between domestic and international politics may be particularly blurred, as domestic political economies rely heavily on foreign markets on one hand; and a state’s sovereignty may also rely on security guarantees from foreign allies. This may complicate legal authoritarian tactics used by more highly-capacitated states. By identifying several ways that lower-capacity authoritarian states strategically use law, this article offers an initial approach to typologizing varieties of legal authoritarianism, with important implications for understanding how these states engage the international order.

“Political Uncertainty” (invited contribution to Encyclopedia of African Politics, eds. Anne Mette Kjaer, Moses Khisa, and Alecia Ndlovu, Edwin Elgar Publishers)

Scholarship on governance has a predictability bias. The state, and political institutions, are often theorised in terms of whether, why, and how, they stabilize power and expectations over time. This view presumes that states (and statesmen) will pursue efficiency at scale, making the emergence of formal, accountable, and predictable institutions a matter of contingent teleological unfolding. Unpredictability has been treated as an issue of derivative conceptual importance, reflecting contextual circumstances that can be organized into one or more variables to explain a deviation from the predictable norm. In contrast, this chapter argues that unpredictability can offer its own insights for theorizing on politics and the state. It traces several key uses of political unpredictability in scholarship on African politics to illustrate this point.