Patriarchial backlash in Uganda? contested masculinities in conflict and peacebuilding

Abstract

A backlash against gender equality and minority rights is sweeping across many countries across the globe, including Uganda. Despite decades of experiencing conflicts and post-conflict nationbuilding, Uganda continues to boast of many apparently progressive policies on gender, such as affirmative action for women’s political representation from 1989, a gender-inclusive Constitution in 1995, a Domestic Violence Act in 2010, or the Uganda Women Entrepreneurship Programme (UWEP) more recently. Yet pushback has been increasing, and inclusive gender-egalitarian policies are often postponed or diluted amidst a shift in discourse toward ‘protection of the family’ (Mwiine et al., 2023). Sexual minorities and groups challenging hegemonic gender norms have become increasingly demonised and criminalised with little visible wider public opposition – such as in the context of the recently passed Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023. This raises thorny questions over how masculinities and gender justice are being contested in Uganda in the wake of recent histories of conflict and peacebuilding and how this may relate to broader politics of gender backlash across the world. The question of ‘men and masculinities’ in feminist conversations is gradually gaining some currency within conflict, post-conflict and peacebuilding initiatives in Uganda and beyond (Large, 1997; Dolan, 2002; Abirafeh, 2007; Anderson, 2009; Onyango, 2012; Watson, 2015; Bamidele, 2016). But it is harder to find analyses of this which link across regional contexts, from the local to the global. Our central question in this chapter is: ‘How can we better understand the backlash against gender equality and inclusive justice in Uganda today and its connections to masculinities, conflict and peacebuilding?’ We argue that we can better understand such backlash in Uganda by tracing historical constructions of masculinities, conflict and peacebuilding within a holistic analysis. This is important because backlash is not an isolated or exogenous event but is itself part of conflicted historical processes and recurring dynamics which shape how we understand and engage with ideas of masculinity, gender, conflict and peacebuilding, both locally in Uganda and as part and parcel of a more global evolving dis/order. Such an analysis must attend to at least three dimensions: a spatial contextualisation linking the local to the global, a decolonial rereading of history and a related deconstruction of meanings given to terms such as ‘gender’, ‘masculinity’, ‘the family’, ‘the nation’, ‘conflict’ and ‘peace’.

In spatial terms, we put the recent backlash against gender equality in Uganda in the context of the concurrent global swell of ‘patriarchal backlash’ because these local dynamics are also connected to global ones. Whilst taking multiple forms and involving diverse actors across settings, such backlash emerges in response to apparent crises and challenges to inequitable orders, and it travels transnationally, operating in typically resonant ways. It focuses on deeply symbolic spatial sites of body, family and nation to ‘righteously’ restore these to some supposed divinely pre-ordained or natural state. We then take a decolonial turn and re-reading of history to recall how the region’s colonial histories of subjugation under European imperialism earlier reshaped gender orders and power relations from the global north. Since then, struggles for independence, local and regional conflicts and efforts at peacebuilding have continued to be co-shaped with neo-colonial influences and interests. We focus on Uganda while also looking at Africa and beyond, because ‘the nation’ is itself a central – and rather recent – construct in this dynamic, emerging from post-colonial and regional conflicts, and can thus only be understood within that deeper history. We then deconstruct the symbolic sites of the body, family and nation in Uganda to highlight related binary, hierarchical and categorical traps embedded in divisive conflictual narratives about these. We explore contested masculinities around recent conflicts and peacebuilding by drawing attention to how vulnerabilities and diversity amongst men have been occluded by patriarchal and reductive constructs and to how conflicts, backlash politics and statecraft take on highly masculine modes of performance. The site of the body gets heteronormatively constructed in blunt sex-binary terms, which occludes other possibilities and gendered intersectional nuances. This does the ideological work of naturalising a binary principle onto other appositions as a simplistic, reductive either/or logic, such as in conflict/peace or perpetration/victimisation. The family gets constructed as traditionally hierarchical and male headed, naturalising a hierarchical principle for broader social organisation and providing a model for the nation and the state as patriarchal and authoritarian. The nation as a whole, then, gets constructed as a bordered and coherent unit of population or citizenry, identified in contradistinction with ‘the foreign’ and naturalising a homogenising, circumscribed and exclusionary logic, a categorical principle. As peacebuilding can itself become a mode of settling a new and differently oppressive social contract – a ‘relative peace’ naturalising new orders of hegemonic masculinity, incorporating and neutralising challenges – we then draw on this analysis to conclude with some reflections on what might mitigate backlash and toxic patriarchal evolution with relevance for peacebuilding in conflict-affected places like Uganda. We call for transcending the anxiety appealed to in backlash by exposing its contradictions and simplistic binaries, hierarchies and categorical logics to aim for more inclusive and negotiated transformations.