ABSTRACT
What explains political stability despite the perniciousness of structural reforms under neoliberalism in some countries in Africa? In Uganda, for instance, a paradoxical relationship has historically existed between state repression and the country’s relative political stability. I argue in this chapter that contrary to the developmentalist explanations that pervade neoliberal scholarship, the political stabilisation of successive colonial and postcolonial governments in Uganda is attributable to the failure to fully incorporate the non-capitalist realm of social reproduction despite resolution of various agrarian questions in favour of the peasantry, which is largely composed of rural women. This chapter attempts to draw a historical link between state repression, peasant struggles from below and postdevelopment in practice. I argue that viewed through the lens of women’s labour, land and food have retained significance both as a means of stabilising the societies under the duress of capitalism and as the primary mode of reproducing precarised and immiserated households in the country – functioning primarily as a gendered subsidy to the state but also as a source of agency for women. Drawing from contemporary land struggles and resistance to land dispossession by Ugandan women, this chapter shows their practices of resistance as articulating anticapitalist interventions that function both as feminist critique of development and as praxis beyond capitalism.
