Paper short abstract:

Uganda’s nascent oil sector has the makings for political disaster already, on top of which the theory of “Oil’s Curse” has entered public narrative, and is affecting the way people understand, and act on, their situation. This work examines the relationship between population and state in the oil producing region of Hoima.

Paper long abstract:

An increasingly distrusted president, with the increased incentive of promised oil wealth to retain power, is bound to affect the process of politics. So Ugandan journalists, political commentators and ordinary people are already remarking, with a striking frequency of references to "Oil's Curse". What, in the wake of the boom-bust period of the 1970s and 1980s was a retrospective political-economic observation appears to have entered the consciousness of a population, and is affecting their lived experience and interpretation of a developing oil industry.

The above is a set of pre-fieldwork observations that I will be pursuing for my Masters of Research dissertation (with fieldwork in the spring of 2013). The purpose is to examine the changing relationship between people and the Ugandan state in the oil producing region of Hoima, using qualitative and quantitative methods to document peoples' experience and subsequent political decision making. A semiotic perspective, as in Spencer (2007), will be employed. The existence of the state is enforced by interaction with its symbols, agents and discourse, which will inevitably be subject to change in this context. This is quantitatively reflected in the political actions that follow.

This area of study would offer a valuable insight into the panel's discussion, in that it examines not just how political trouble is produced (the symptoms of which fall under the adage of Oil's Curse), but how the notion of the "Curse" itself has entered public consciousness and is affecting peoples' impression of the state apparatus and their politicians.