From rural rebellions to urban riots: political competition and changing patterns of violent political revolt in Uganda

Violent political revolt has been common in independent Uganda. For a long time, such revolts were exclusively expressed as rural-based rebel groups fighting the government. Since the mid-2000s, however, this seems to have come to an end. Instead, urban riots, very rare in the past, have become much more common. This article analyses these changing patterns of types and location of violent political revolt in Uganda under the National Resistance Movement government. It argues that the earlier prevalence of rural rebellions can be explained by the combination of a coercive and militarised state, and weak and ethnically factionalised political forces who took their violent resistance to rural regional bases. Over time, however, government counter-insurgency became more effective and the conditions for insurgency were undermined by withdrawal of external support. Furthermore, the reintroduction of multi-party politics in 2005 opened up new avenues for political expression. The changes to the political system were, however, more nominal than real in many respects. While the rebel option had become less attractive and feasible, a series of social, economic and political grievances remained which were only partly channelled through party politics. They also found expression through sporadic urban violent revolt.     

The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

Abstract

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.     

Youth Adversities Amplify the Association between Adult Stressors and Chronic Inflammation in a Domain Specific Manner: Nuancing the Early Life Sensitivity Model

There is strong evidence that chronic, systemic inflammation hastens onset of the diseases of old age that ultimately lead to death. Importantly, several studies suggest that childhood adversity predicts chronic inflammation. Unfortunately, this research has been plagued by retrospective reports of childhood adversity, an absence of controls for adult stressors, and a failure to investigate various competing models of the link between childhood adversity and chronic inflammation. The present study was designed to address these limitations. Using 18 years of data collected from 413 African Americans (58% female) included in the Family and Community Health Study, hierarchical regression analyses provided support for a nuanced early life sensitivity explanation for the link between early adversity and adult chronic inflammation. Controlling for health risk behaviors and adult SES, late childhood (ages 10–12) adversity amplified the association between adult adversity (age 29) and chronic inflammation. This interaction operated in a domain-specific fashion. Harsh parenting amplified the relation between intimate partner hostility and inflammation, whereas early discrimination amplified the relation between adult discrimination and inflammation. These findings suggest that individuals may be primed to respond physiologically to adverse adult circumstances that resemble those experienced earlier in life.