Prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda: Power, politics, and the public

This article examines prisoner releases in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the inauguration of Yoweri Museveni in 1986. During these decades, Uganda's government enacted over 30 large scale releases of prisoners and detainees, affecting approximately 20,000 individuals. These acts of clemency were highly politicized and frequently occurred during times of political transition or tension. While framed by Uganda's leaders and the official media as gestures of goodwill and symbols of progress, these releases ultimately reinforced executive power and the centrality of incarceration in state repression.

Religion, Religions and J.Rawls’ Political Project

The essay explores the relationship between religion and Rawls from the perspective of some issues that are central to his political project: political autonomy, public reason and the implications of the fact of pluralism for the development of the idea of decent peoples. Religion has a dual dimension in political liberalism, plural and singular. The problem of the liberal political transition is to allow these two dimensions to coexist harmoniously within the liberal political project.

Rioting for Representation

Ethnic riots are a costly and all too common occurrence during political transitions in multi-ethnic settings. Why do ethnic riots occur in certain parts of a country and not others? How does violence eventually decline? Drawing on rich case studies and quantitative evidence from Indonesia between 1990 and 2012, this book argues that patterns of ethnic rioting are not inevitably driven by inter-group animosity, weakness of state capacity, or local demographic composition. Rather, local ethnic elites strategically use violence to leverage their demands for political inclusion during political transition and that violence eventually declines as these demands are accommodated. Toha breaks new ground in showing that particular political reforms—increased political competition, direct local elections, and local administrative units partitioning—in ethnically diverse contexts can ameliorate political exclusion and reduce overall levels of violence between groups.

Success in the Shadow of Failure: UN Mediation in Yemen (2011–2015)

Over the past few years, Yemen has become synonymous with mediation failure. This contrasts sharply with the situation in the early 2010s, when the United Nations played a crucial role in persuading Yemen’s long-serving President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to step down from power and, at least initially, successfully steered the country during the ensuing political transition. By analyzing UN mediation efforts during the mandate of Special Adviser Jamal Benomar, the article draws attention to the multiple shifting benchmarks for success. It adopts a phase-differentiated approach to mediation evaluation, which not only allows for recognition of earlier successes, but also enables an analysis of relevant factors influencing mediation success or failure in different stages of the mediation process. In the final instance, the analysis suggests that the eventual failure of UN mediation in Yemen can be traced to conflict and contextual factors rather than the mediator or the mediation process.

The Dark Continent: «African Tales by Shakespeare» and the Experience of Transitional Community

This text is an analysis of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s 2011 production, African Tales by Shakespeare, tracing the project of community taken up in the performance. The central thesis takes this to be neither a national community nor a dispersed, intersectional coalition, as Bryce Lease has formulated the difference between Polish political and traditional theater, but rather a transitional community—unstable, unsuccessful, and rooted in the experience of political transition. The author, by invoking references to the visual arts present in the performance, points to other community projects emerging from the experience of transition while showing how, when appropriated for the purposes of performance, their meanings change radically. In the masculine, phallic, and violent world of African Tales, art and philosophy born of the experience of femininity are lost, twisted, and forgotten. Among the most important threads of analysis, however, is the way racialization and racism function in the play. From this perspective, the problematic status of the community the play establishes is most clearly seen: as a community of phantasmic, aspirational, transitional whiteness