Making sense of the state amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kampala, Uganda

Résumé

The multiple strategies deployed by states to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic caused uncertainty across the globe, necessitating citizens’ reimagination of states that were intervening in their lives and livelihoods in unprecedented ways. This article draws on the concept of sensemaking to explore the ways in which citizens in urban areas of the global South encountered and interpreted the state in the novel situation. It is based on qualitative data generated with teachers in low-cost, private secondary schools in two divisions of Kampala city, Uganda. The findings show three main ways in which they made sense of the state: as successful, as caring, and as arbitrary and inegalitarian. We conclude that while the pandemic provided an opportunity to reimagine citizen–state relations, it soon turned into a re-articulation of the already existing semi-authoritarian, neo-patrimonial, militaristic and uneven image of the Ugandan state. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . This article is available Open Access thanks to the LUP Authors Fund.

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