Arbitrary States

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of authoritarianism have noted a trend in which institutions designed to check arbitrary power have been hollowed out to facilitate its exercise. As they grapple with how to understand the disjunct between state institutions and enforcement power, scholars of sub-Saharan African states have been doing so for decades. Based on in-depth field research on local security in Museveni’s Uganda, Tapscott offers an innovative and provocative contribution to studies of authoritarianism and state consolidation: rulers maintain control by creating unpredictability in the everyday lives of local authorities and ordinary citizens. In this type of modern authoritarian regime, rulers institutionalize arbitrariness to limit the space for political action, while they keep citizens marginally engaged in the democratic process. By showing not just that unpredictability matters for governance, but also how it is manufactured and sustained, this book challenges and extends cutting-edge scholarship on authoritarianism, the state, and governance.

True Internet Personhood: A Comprehensive Analysis of Blockchain-Human DNA Hashing Identification Systems and Protocols

“…A blockchain constitutes a distributed digital ledger maintained via decentralized computational consensus rather than by a central authority (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016). Network nodes globally host tamper-resistant transaction copies, while cryptographic linkage seals blocks into an immutable shared record.…”

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

“…In such contexts, the state may engage in talk of rights and institutional reform but it also “turns a blind eye” to official malpractice when it is political salient, or instrumentalises its own judicial apparatus for political ends (Scharbatke‐Church & Chigas, 2016, p. 32). Tapscott (2021, p. 27) conceptualizes this mode of authoritarian rule in Uganda as “arbitrary governance”: while citizens usually experience the state as “woefully fragmented and low capacity” in relation to the provision and exercise of public goods such as justice, state power remains “ever‐present” in people's minds because it can be imposed or withdrawn in unpredictable ways.…”

Democratic Backsliding in Africa?

“…Thirty-five years later, Museveni still holds the presidency, and the initial ambition to establish a democratic dispensation has been muted by what amounts to institutionalized arbitrary governancei.e. to maintain control by creating unpredictability (Tapscott, 2021). In the process much of the early democratic promise has been diluted, and in some cases reversed, effectively putting Uganda (in the case universe of this book) at the bottom of the democracy landscape together with Zimbabwe.…”