Naked bodies and collective action: repertoires of protest in Uganda’s militarised, authoritarian regime

How can citizens living under increasingly militarized and authoritarian regimes exercise political voice? Using an in-depth case study of naked protest in modern day Uganda, this article finds that naked bodies allow citizens to employ three types of overlapping power to confront a militarized authoritarian state: biopower, symbolic power, and cosmological power. The study illustrates one way in which citizens seek to engage militarized regimes—and in doing so, how political voice takes particular forms with limited capacity to instigate broader political claim-making that might be associated with country- or region-wide political action.