Social Structures and the Making of Museveni’s Civil-Authoritarian Regime in Uganda

This book explores the resilience and longevity of President Yoweri Museveni’s regime in Uganda, tracing the evolution of the National Resistance Army (NRA) from a victorious insurgency into one of Africa’s most enduring regimes. It challenges the assumption that the NRA’s 1986 victory in Uganda marked a complete institutional rupture. Instead, the book argues that the NRA —later institutionalized as the National Resistance Movement (NRM)—governed within a residual social landscape shaped by entrenched traditional monarchies, religious institutions, landed elites, and historic political parties that survived Uganda’s civil wars. Confronted with these deeply rooted social forces, the NRM regime was compelled to fuse coercion with co-optation, selective patronage, and strategic concessions. This hybrid approach produced a civil-authoritarian order in which political control is sustained not only through repression, but also through co-optation, negotiation, and accommodation of powerful societal interests. By foregrounding the interplay between state power and enduring social structures, the book contributes to comparative debates on authoritarianism, state-building, and post-conflict governance in Africa and beyond.