160th JSPS NAIROBI SEMINAR (25th September)

更新日:2009/09/19

【Date&Time】 10 a.m. 25th September 2009
【Venue】 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Nairobi Research Station

【Speaker】 Gaku Moriguchi, Consultant, Embassy of Japan in Uganda
(Ph. D. candidate, Graduate School of Social Sciences in Hitotsubashi University, Japan)

【Title】 “Powers of State and Conflicts of City: Urban Violence, Ethnic Tension and Class Struggles in Modern Kampala, Uganda”
Keywords; Development and modernisation, ethnic and class boundaries urban conflict, slum, mob justice, child sacrifices, and urban demonstration.

【Abstract】 This paper will examine the relationship between the power of a modern state and violence in urban settings, particularly by tracing back the history of development in Uganda and examining some of the current cases of urban violence in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda.
The discussion will consist of three parts. The first part will discuss theoretical issues of the African state power, by examining the case of development in Uganda. I will also re-consider the concept of the Foucauldian’s “bio-power” in the modern African context. As Ferguson did, power and development in the modern African context can be discussed in the term of “bio-power”, as a very static set of controlling technologies of modern state (Ferguson 1994). In this part, I focus on how the inside politics of state and power of development have been coordinated to formulate regional economical gap and urban classes in Uganda.
The second part of discussion will be a historical description of urban development and formation of slums in Kampala, Uganda. As indicated in the first part of the paper and also discussed by Mamdani (1976) and Mudoola (1993), the class formation and economical gaps at the national level is so much related to the colonial and post-colonial history of Uganda. In this part, I will see how the urbanscape of Kampala has been created by the rules of class and ethnic groups and how slums and the lower social classes have been marginalised in current urban development. I would also like to do some ethnographic description of the life in a Kampala slum.
The final part will examine some violence cases in Kampala, such as mob justice, demonstration, and child sacrifices, and also try to see the theoretical theme on the power and resistance in urban contexts of Kampala. I will mention difficulties of theorising urban conflicts in the term of resistance against state power, by seeing above violence cases in Kampala. Furthermore, to conclude the discussion of bio-power in Foucauldian’s context, I will point out some issues of subjectivities in Africa.

Bibliography
Ferguson, James 1994, The Anti-politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel 1975, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Mamdani, Mahmood 1976, Politics and Class Formation in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers.
Mudoola, Dan M. 1993, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers.