The Shrinking Political Arena

The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda by Nelson Kasfir challenges conventional wisdom about political engagement and ethnic identity in postcolonial Africa. While political science often assumes that once people gain political rights they will not surrender them, and that ethnic loyalties are intractable, Kasfir demonstrates that regimes can and do contract political participation and mute ethnic expression. Focusing on Uganda in the late 1960s, he examines how state authorities dismantled structures of participation established at independence and attempted to remove ethnicity from politics. The result was a surprising decline in public assertion of ethnic demands, even though ethnicity had been central to Uganda’s colonial and early postcolonial politics. This paradox prompts Kasfir to reconceptualize both participation and ethnicity, showing that they are not immutable forces but contingent practices shaped by political engineering.

Through detailed analysis, Kasfir reveals participation as a composite phenomenon in which governments can either stimulate or restrict involvement, and ethnicity as an intermittent, situational force that rises or recedes depending on context. By investigating Uganda’s experience, he situates African politics within broader global debates about nationalism, identity, and state power. He further highlights how rulers frame policies to reduce political engagement—sometimes out of self-interest, sometimes with the aim of fostering national unity—and how such policies interact with the lived realities of ethnic communities. Richly informed by field research at Makerere University and extensive engagement with Ugandan officials, students, and citizens, Kasfir’s study remains a seminal exploration of the tensions between participation, ethnicity, and state authority. It illuminates the delicate balance African leaders confront in pursuing stability while negotiating the powerful pull of identity and inclusion.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.