Policing in a Post-Conflict State: Evidence from Uganda

• Author: David A. Dow
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211047398
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(9) 1595–1628

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211047398

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Policing in a

Post-Conf‌lict State:

Evidence from Uganda

David A. Dow

1



Abstract

How do governments in post-conf‌lict settings provide for policing within their

countries? I argue that leaders respond to both electoral concerns and se-

curity threats in shaping the geographic provision of policing infrastructure.

Focusing on Uganda, I contend that the territorial expansion of policing has

followed a distinct political logic. First, I use panel data on police infrastructure

to demonstrate increased construction in counties with previously lower

electoral support for the incumbent regime. Additionally, I f‌ind that counties

with violence are more likely to experience increases in construction, but

especially in areas where the incumbent has more support. Finally, I show that

(1) proximity to police infrastructure is associated with worse individual

perceptions of the police and (2) that increased construction of police in-

frastructure has large signif‌icant effects on reducing voter turnout while

increasing vote share for the incumbent president. These f‌indings have im-

portant implications for post-conf‌lict reconstruction, stability, and violence.

Keywords

conf‌lict processes, African politics, police, state building, repression

1

The University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy, Tucson, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

David A. Dow, The University of Arizona, School of Government and Public Policy, 115A Social

Sciences Building, 1145 E South Campus Drive, Tucson, AZ 85721-0027, USA.

Email: ddow@arizona.edu

Introduction

The reconstruction of policing is a central challenge to any post-conf‌lict state’s

emergence from the ashes of civil war. After a state’s monopoly on the use of

legitimate violence breaks down during civil war, it is quite common to f‌ind a

legacy of weak and highly repressive police institutions in post-civil war

countries. Improving both the quality and presence of the state’s security

forces is often crucial for governments attempting to re-establish order and

ensure a lasting peace. The reconstruction of policing capacity can also be

important for the ruling government itself to prevent further political violence

that could remove it from power. Ideally, political leaders seek to transform

their police from a predatory, politicized institution into one with the capacity

to fairly serve and protect its citizens, while helping to establish the order that

might spur economic development. Yet, sharp resource constraints and weak

and geographically uneven state capacity generate large obstacles for projects

of state security reconstruction.

Further complicating matters is the temptation for leaders to harness the

power of the police for purposes of political control, demobilizing popular

dissent, and intimidating and repressing voters. While police repression occurs

across the spectrum of regime types, it is particularly widespread in weakly

institutionalized, democratizing or hybrid regimes and these kinds of regimes

are frequently engulfed in civil conf‌lict and subsequent projects of post-conf‌lict

reconstruction. In these contexts, there are fewer institutional mechanisms to

constrain thedeployment of security personnel forpurposes of political control.

And it is here whereelectoral politics, oftennewly resumed, present anotherkey

threat to a government’s hold on power. This threat can play a critical role in

shaping the development and deployment of policing forces.

In this article, I examine the tension between government efforts to expand

policing in response to threats of political violence and those actions that direct

policingtowards electoralrepression and aimto monopolize electoralcontrol. In

doing so, this article contributes to our understanding of post-conf‌lict policing by

offeringan original theoryof resource allocation of thestate’s security app aratus.

Specif‌ically, I analyze the implications of these state-building strategies on

geographic variation in the provision of police infrastructure. I argue that post-

conf‌lict governments largely pursue policing strategies targeted at repressing

peacefulelectoral opposition areas, oftenat the expense of reconstructing violent

opposition areas, due to differences in both the scale of the threat and the cost-

benef‌it calculations associated with the investments required to effectively police

these two types of non-state actors. I further argue that levels of political violence

matter in shaping the kinds of electoral constituencies that regimes target for

increased policing. For peaceful areas, governments will disproportionately

target constituencies with higher concentrations of political opposition members

in an effort to reduce voter turnout. But in violent areas, government policing

1596 Comparative Political Studies 55(9)

effortsare more likely to favor swing andcore areas, as the governmentseeks to

protect its own supporters from violence.

I examine these questionsempirically by focusing on the policing efforts of

the Ugandan government since 1986. Though the Museveni-led National

ResistanceMovement (NRM) governmenthas maintained political controlover

the last 30 years, the security situation in varying parts of the country has

remained tenuous.Large-scale violencehas occurred in some areas while others

have remained peaceful. The rehabilitationof the Ugandan police force from a

legacy of repressionand the provision of police infrastructure across the country

was an important challenge for the government to undertake if it wanted to

improve long-term stability and peace. But the country has also experienced

periods of both democratization and authoritarian retrenchment over this same

time (Tripp, 2010). While electoral politics were reinstated following years of

dictatorship, civil war, and one-party rule, Uganda remains a hybrid regime. It

therefore offers a useful case for studying security expansion and regime

consolidation in the context of weakly institutionalized electoral politics.

In my analysis of post-conf‌lict Uganda, I offer a systematic empirical analysis

of the construction of police infrastructure using a unique geo-located dataset of

police stations and posts over time. First, the analysis demonstrates that police

infrastructure has been simultaneously targeted not only towards peaceful op-

position areas, but also areas of higher regime support that have experienced

violence. Second, I complement the infrastructure data with an analysis of survey

data to show that citizens’perceptions of the police vary according to their

proximity to police infrastructure. Third, I show that construction of new police

infrastructure has a signif‌icant effect both on shifting vote share to the incumbent

and reducing voter turnout. Finally, I provide qualitative evidence gathered from

government records, newspaper archives, and other secondary source s to more

broadly examine the nature of post-war policing in Uganda.

This paper proceeds as follows. First, I present a theoretical framework that

illustrates the problem of resource allocation in post-war environments and

then helps explain where post-conf‌lict governments will target police in-

frastructure when faced with opposition from both non-violent political

parties and violent militant groups. Next, I provide a brief overview on the

trajectory of policing in Uganda. Then I present the data on police infra-

structure and the research design before turning to the empirical results. The

f‌inal section concludes with a discussion of the f‌indings and their implications

for the quality and nature of policing in Uganda and beyond.

Resource Allocation for Policing in

Post-Conf‌lict Settings

In recent years, political scientists have begun to examine the politics of

policing in the developing world much more extensively. One strand of this

Dow 1597