Vigilantes and the State: Evidence of a Security Assemblage in Uganda

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Responses to Crime and Insecurity

Abstract

Though scholarship on vigilantism has proliferated in recent years, robust comparative insights are rare and basic questions remain unanswered, such as: Why do vigilante groups emerge? Under what conditions do they provide security? While much of the scholarship on vigilantes has suggested that they fill security and governance vacuums, and should be perceived as more helpful where they do not have to compete with other public authorities, new evidence suggests that the dynamics may be more complicated. To contribute to this debate, this article uses 10 months of qualitative field research on vigilante groups in northern Uganda, paired with OLS analysis of survey data conducted in the same region. It finds that in northern Uganda, vigilantes are more common where more public authorities are present, and perceived as more helpful where other public authorities are also perceived as more helpful. This relationship is explained as part of a security assemblage, where vigilantes work as auxiliary security providers to existing public authorities, and—in ideal situations—are held accountable to the community by those same public authorities. The article offers three main contributions: (1) methodologically, it illustrates the importance of studying violent actors using mixed methods, and to use inductively derived terminology to gather and analyze findings; (2) empirically, it shows that contrary to much of the literature on vigilantes, these groups are not filling a security vacuum—rather, they act as auxiliaries to other public authorities; and (3) analytically, the findings suggest that the presence of vigilante groups should not necessarily be read as an indicator of state weakness, but rather of a complex governing arrangement.

Author

• Rebecca Tapscott