Naked Bodies and Collective Action: Repertoires of Protest in Uganda’s Militarised, Authoritarian Regime

Abstract

How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes-and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with countryor region-wide political action.

Arbitrary States

“…Similarly complex dynamics emerged in other confrontations between citizens and state security forces. For example, a crime preventer told me about a confrontation that took place in another town in northern Uganda, where the police and military were deployed to evict the population so the government could sell the land to a private investor (also see Abonga et al 2019). The crime preventer explained that the defence forces had been given a clear set of instructions for how to deal with uncooperative locals:…”

“…Instead, it explains certain limits of collective action in Uganda, and how the regime has managed to project authoritarian control and co-exist with surprisingly effective state institutions that at times impose checks and balances. Citizens simply have fewer options for organizing and making political claims, and the spaces within which they can do so-while present-are fragile (also see Abonga et al 2019).…”

Decent and indecent exposures: naked veterans and militarized (counter-)violences after war

“…At the same time, just because nudity frequently enables violation does not mean that nudity is always reducible to violation. Nudity also has a long history of calling war-making practices and structural violence into question through nude protest (Abonga et al 2019;Eileraas 2014) (Nagarajan 2013). It is not my intention to imply that the Hikes could or should resolve this debate but to emphasize the productivity signaled by the debate's persistence.…”

Activism as political action in Uganda: The role of social media

“…Another example of activism took the form of naked protest, a form of demonstration in which protesters strip to express their discontent towards government authority. This form of protest has become common in Uganda, especially among women (see Abonga et al 2019;Ebila and Tripp 2016). Several naked demonstrations have been staged in Uganda since 2012 in protest against land-related issues (Lawino 2012;Onyango and Emwamu 2015;Kirinya 2018).…”