Producing Institutional Resilience Through Crisis Narratives: The Case of Covid-19 in Uganda

Since the early 2010s, research in comparative authoritarianism has flourished, taking stock of the mitigated consequences of the third wave of democratization. However, with analysis focusing heavily on institutional mechanisms and cooptation practices, less attention has been paid to autocrats’ discourses and their connections to resilience mechanisms. Yet, seminal work by Wedeen (1999) demonstrate the disciplinary effects of such discourses, while recent research on legitimation strategies (Grauvogel and Von Soest 2014; Josua 2017) shows how to overcome the normative and methodological criticisms of the concept of legitimacy and contributed to dismiss the view of autocrats’ speeches as mere “cheap talk”. In the wake of those research, this paper proposes to investigate the narrative developed around Covid-19 by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and how it fuels – or does not – institutional resilience. Theoretically, the paper builds on an understanding of resilience as a dynamic and interpretative process rooted in a co-constituted dynamic of crisis and adaptation. Resilience is made possible through the (re)production of a crisis narrative. As such, the paper is located in an interpretative tradition that conceptualizes crisis as social all the way down and discourse as constitutive of social reality. Methodologically, it relies on the tools of discourse analysis and uses data collected on the President’s official website and his twitter account. The paper consequently looks into (1) what is the proposed narrative on Covid-19 – is it a crisis narrative? – and more specifically (2) how is the disrupting event defined and (3) what are the proposed responses.