Paper short abstract:

Drawing on development studies and international relations, this paper explains how institutional donor dynamics at a number of levels (individual/ mission/ (home) capital) intersect with key-strategies of the Museveni regime in Uganda, to sustain and magnify the regime's authoritarian dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

The Museveni regime in Uganda was for long seen as an archetype of a ‘hybrid regime’, with characteristics of both authoritarian and democratic regimes. This hybridity has largely disappeared, with the Museveni regime having become outrightly authoritarian. Paradoxically, donor engagement has become more lenient towards the regime: whereas in this hybrid past, governance transgressions – such as human rights violations or corruption – could be met with strong donor reactions, this has largely disappeared under this escalation of authoritarianism. This paper sets out to explain why this is the case. Drawing on development studies and international relations, it explains how institutional donor dynamics intersect with engagement strategies of the Museveni regime towards the donors, to sustain and magnify these authoritarian dynamics. Concretely, it first focuses on donor institutional dynamics on the individual-, mission- and (home) capital- level, and the way in which economic- and (geo)political incentives at (and between) these various levels intertwine for a ‘business as usual’ approach. Second, it shows how the Museveni regime has been able to strategically make use of these donor dynamics; on the one hand to tap into donor priorities and create a form of (co)dependency; and on the other hand to avoid accountability for governance transgressions.