This book explores state–civil society relations in contemporary Uganda in order to illustrate and explain the scope for and capacity of different forces to democratise the state. It examines the social basis of political rule, thus raising the related question of ‘how social relations block or promote political democracy’ in processes of state formation. Sjögren examines state–civil society relations, state formation and democratisation by extrapolating the politics of governance reforms in Uganda's health sector (national level) and decentralisation (at the local level).
Reforms in Uganda's health sector have occurred within a liberalised and donor-dependent economy but state formation strategies only allow services that create legitimation while preserving control over civil society and depoliticising political spaces (p. 101). In order to capture the complex relationship between state–society relations, state formation and democratisation at the local level, Sjögren carries out an empirical study of Uganda's decentralisation policies in Masaka district. One key finding is that local level politics in Uganda is characterised by formal and informal power convergences ‘which have opened up space for political forces’ (pp. 230–1).
The underlying and intriguing dialectic of the study is interest representation and conflict regulation as manifest through state–civil society dynamics and state formation. Sjögren's argument is that state formation in Uganda can be located at the intersection of the military as a governing institution (i.e. militarism) and policies (mostly pushed by international donors) for institutionalising a technocratic governance regime. The book questions the ‘supreme locus of state power in Uganda – is it the constitution or the armed forces?’ Sjogren's basic claim is that Uganda's contemporary power structure is increasingly authoritarian thus placing the military (rather than the constitution) at the apex of state power. This is because contrary to the dominant view espoused by Rueschemeyer et al. (Reference Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens1992: 64–6), the Ugandan state has not attained relative autonomy from dominant classes and has been insufficiently embedded among subordinate ones. The book makes a strong argument: ‘speculative economic elites entrenched themselves in the state, and the government correspondingly suppressed autonomous organisation (read civil society) that seemed to offer resistance to those and similar forces’ (p. 254). Thus the consolidation of democracy in Uganda remains elusive as state formation increasingly occurs along an autocratic trajectory.
The book does have a few flaws. Its narrative is at times arduous because of unnecessarily long sentences and the not so meticulous attention of the copy-editor. The introduction, for example, seems to point the reader to chapter 5 (instead of chapter 6) for the Masaka case study. Moreover, Between Militarism and Technocratic Governance offers no new theoretical framework. Although it eschews theories such as neo-patrimonialism as epiphenomenal, its insistence on the primacy of ‘relations of domination in society as these impact on state formation’ (p. 240) seems incomplete without considering Mushtaq Khan's (Reference Khan, Harris, Hunter and Lewis1995, Reference Khan, Khan and Jomo2000) political settlement framework which also takes social relations as a point of departure. Nonetheless by exploiting the state–civil society dialectic and its relationship to democratic (or autocratic) state formation, Sjögren makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the once promising prospects of Uganda's democratic project.
