Democratizing the gun. The composite imagination of a coercive citizenship in Uganda

When they took power in 1986, the new political elites of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) promoted a renewed model of citizenship in the name of which citizens had to take charge of their own security. This article reexamines the social and historical depth of the conceptions of citizenship and belonging that are expressed through practices of participation in law and order and their political promotion by connecting several scales : transnational, national, regional, and local. Because they have been the source of much brutality, these practices have been criticized. However, they can also support the production of moral communities. Far from being antagonistic, the conceptions of order and citizenship as expressed and produced from below and from above through participation in law and order concur in outlining an ideal of the village as the cradle of the production of civic persons.