Diplomatic Strategy and Regional Hegemony: Uganda’s Foreign Policy in the East African Region

Democracy in Uganda has evolved in a stop-start fashion since the overthrow of Idi Amin, and its regional foreign policy has been brash if not aggressive. Consequently, Uganda has played a direct role in nearly all of its neighbours and beyond. The transformation of its foreign policy can be accounted for by the interplay between the military and the political class, whose worldviews and ideologies are Pan Africanist, one way or another. Their behaviour has been based on a petrodollar-fueled gunboat diplomacy that the discourages the use of soft power. This paper applies an actor-specific theory to analyze the impact of Uganda’s foreign policy behaviour of military and political élite activity within the region. And it observes that the military constituency has shaped Uganda’s foreign policy to such an extent that the threat, and occasional recourse, to force marks Uganda’s relations with immediate neighbors and even those far away—those that pose an existential threat to Uganda in particular, solid and constant threat. This has been the setting for the country’s military incursions in the Central African Republic, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda and Kenya. It argues that the endurance of the country's foreign policy in the region rests on the hybridization of the actors and a neologism that consists of a military, a political elite and other critical foreign policy capacities. This would bring the country’s foreign policy in regional integration to look legitimate. Received: 18 November 2025 / Accepted: 28 December 2025 / Published: January 2026