In 2005, a national referendum returned Uganda to multi-party competition, lifting a ban on the activities of political parties that had been in place since the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986.

The decision to restore formal pluralistic competition was arrived at in large part by international pressure on the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

However, five years later, as Uganda heads into its second round of elections under a multi-party system next year, the country is less “democratic” and has been described as a virtual one party state.

In some instances, observers have commented that the Ugandan parliament under the single-party “Movement” system had more bite than the current multiparty plebiscite, which is little more than a rubberstamp of the ruling National Resistance Movement.

What explains the apparent failure of the multi-party era to advance real democratic reforms in Uganda?

Angelo Izama is an investigative reporter at the Daily Monitor, Uganda's only independent newspaper, as well as a radio talk show panelist, researcher, consultant and analyst on security and governance in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. In his 7-year career in the media he has also worked as a radio producer, host, news manager and multi-media journalist for the Nation Media Group in Uganda. He has been a frequent commentator on current affairs for international news agencies including the BBC, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, AFP and African-based organizations. Mr. Izama was a fall 2007 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he proposed and assessed regional options for peace in Northern Uganda regarding the Lords Resistance Army. In 2008 he founded Fanaka Kwa Wote, a Ugandan-based think tank, to advance research on human security and democracy in the Great Lakes region.

In the course of his career, Mr. Izama has covered topics including national elections in 2001 and 2005, the conflict in Northern Uganda, internal security, corruption, and most recently, issues surrounding the discovery of oil in western Uganda. In 2009 he filed a case using Uganda's Access to Information Act to compel the government to make public the details of oil Production Sharing Agreements signed with foreign oil companies. The case was dismissed in February, on the same day Mr. Izama was arrested and charged with criminal libel in Ugandan courts over his critical writing.

Join the Stanford Association for International Development in exploring issues of development and post-conflict health on February 20th in Annenberg Auditorium with Andrew Natsios, the Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2001-2005, and four expert panels of academics, NGO organizers, and government officials. Panels include:
 

1. Humanitarian Intervention: The Question of Sovereignty
2. The Spread of Infectious Disease in the Wake of Conflict
3. The Psychological Scars of War
4. Refuges and Refugees: Children in Conflict Zones

We are excited to have thirteen expert speakers, a large and talented staff, and all of you as our guests. We hope to see you there!

Made possible by our sponsors: Office of Global Health; Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law; Stanford Association for International Development; Bingham Grant; VPUE; Humanities & Sciences; Stanford in Government; ASSU Undergraduate Senate; ASSU Speaker's Bureau

Dr. Matthew J. Nelson has spent several years conducting archival, ethnographic, and survey-based field research in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. His first book concerns the relationship between Islam, Islamic law, and democratic politics in Pakistan (In the Shadow of Shari‘ah: Islam, Islamic Law, and Democracy in Pakistan, Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2010). His current work addresses the politics of sectarian and doctrinal diversity in the context of Islamic education. Dr. Nelson completed his PhD in Politics at Columbia (2002). He held faculty positions at UC Santa Cruz, Bates College, and Yale University before taking up his current post in the Department of Politics at SOAS (University of London). This year (2009-2010) he is the Wolfensohn Family Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Nelson can be reached at mn6@soas.ac.uk.

One of the routine assumptions of students of democratization has been that there is a close, causal relationship between liberalization and democratization. The former is said to drive those who concede it toward convoking credible elections and, eventually, tolerating ruler accountability to citizens. The link between those processes of regime transformation is alleged to be the mobilization of civil society. It has been argued that the weakness or absence of this linkage is one (among many) of the conditions which make the polities of the Middle East and North Africa resistant to democratization. We propose to open a public discussion on this topic.

Philippe Schmitter is Professor Emeritus at the European University Institute (EUI), and was on the faculty of the EUI from 1996 to 2004, after ten years at Stanford University. He is also a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest, at the Istituto delle Scienze Humanistiche in Florence and the University of Siena.

He has been vice-president of the American Political Science Association and the recipient of numerous professional awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim in 1978, the award for lifetime achievement in European politics by the ECPR in 2008, and the award for lifetime achievement in the study of European integration by EUSA in 2009.

Sean Yom is a Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL at Stanford University. He finished his Ph.D. at the Department of Government at Harvard University in June 2009, with a dissertation entitled "Iron Fists in Silk Gloves: Building Political Regimes in the Middle East". His primary research explores the origins and durability of authoritarian regimes in this region, focusing on the historical interplay between early social conflicts and Western geopolitical interventions.