For decades, academic scholarship and popular writing on Idi Amin’s Uganda have been dominated—almost overdetermined—by the spectacle of state violence. While that violence was real and devastating, this focus has left little room to understand the experiences of ordinary citizens whose daily labor kept the dictatorship running. Derek R. Peterson’s A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda offers a compelling corrective. Drawing on a remarkable array of archival materials—many of them newly accessible thanks to preservation projects he organized and led—Peterson shifts our attention to the civil servants, cultural workers, and self-appointed experts who believed themselves to be living on the frontlines of a global struggle against racism and imperialism. Rather than portraying Amin’s regime as a monolith of chaos, he reveals a political order sustained by the earnest, hopeful, and often contradictory work of people who saw their contributions as vital to Uganda’s liberation. It is a reframing that forces readers to hold together the regime’s catastrophic violence with the idealism, industriousness, and moral certainty that animated many of its supporters.

Peterson argues that the regime’s durability cannot be understood through violence alone. At the heart of his book is the claim that the regime endured because ordinary people—civil servants, cultural workers, and technical specialists—continued to labor, improvise, and invest meaning in their work despite the violence around them. As Peterson puts it, the book explains “how, in a time of spectacular violence in public life, patriotic men and women found reason to invest their energies in serving Africa’s most brutal dictatorship” (6). This argument develops across three central themes that structure the book. The first is that radio was essential to Amin’s power, functioning as “a megaphone by which the Amin regime could admonish, instruct, and mobilize constituencies that were otherwise out of reach” (16). The second is that many ordinary Ugandans understood themselves to be serving on the frontlines of a global struggle against racism and imperialism, a vision Amin actively cultivated as he sought to place Uganda at the center of world affairs. And the third is that curatorial institutions, such as archives, museums, and monuments, provided symbolic weight to routine civil work, offering “a source of confidence and hope” to those who believed they were helping build a new nation (19). Yet as Peterson makes clear, the very patriotic gestures that animated this work often ended up hurting fellow Ugandans. The wars against economic, political, and cultural imperialism were ultimately fought at home.

Methodologically, the book is grounded in an extraordinary range of archival materials, many of which have never been used by scholars of Uganda. The heart of this research lies in the district archives that Peterson and his team helped to restore and reorganize through long-term collaborative preservation work. These materials, together with holdings from the Uganda National Records Centre and Archives, the High Court, the Church of Uganda, the Uganda Museum, the Mengo Court, the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, and numerous other archives within and outside Uganda, provide a clear view of the bureaucratic labor that sustained Amin’s regime. Peterson supplements these sources with materials culled from major British, American, and United Nations archives, as well as collections in Israel and Canada. He also utilizes interviews to illuminate how individuals remembered their work and represented their past. This evidentiary breadth allows him to foreground the ordinary people who made the regime function.

The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with the political turbulence of decolonization that shaped Amin’s rise. The opening chapter examines the transition to independence and Milton Obote’s first term, showing how his government became what Nancy Rose Hunt calls a “nervous state,” a characterization Peterson applies to explain Obote’s growing reliance on the military and the conditions that enabled Amin’s 1971 coup. The next chapter turns to Amin’s first years in power and explains why many initially viewed his rule as liberatory, even as early supporters such as the Baganda later became his strongest critics.

The narrative then shifts to the infrastructure and everyday labor of Amin’s revolutionary government. Radio broadcasting takes center stage in Chapter Three, which reconstructs how radio became essential to state power at a moment when civil administration was constrained by severe infrastructure shortages, and how local officials used news reports to demonstrate their effectiveness, a form of “propaganda from below” (95). Chapter Four moves to the entrepreneurs and vigilantes who sacrificed time and resources to meet the demands of Amin’s “government of action” (99), a regime that relied on visible displays of loyalty and initiative. The Economic War anchors Chapter Five, which examines the expulsion of more than 50,000 people of Indian and Pakistani descent in the name of economic “liberation,” along with the 1975 Economic Crimes Decree that made smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging capital offenses that disproportionately targeted ordinary Ugandans. Violence remains the focus in Chapter Six, which shows how the army became central to government administration and how coercion became an inescapable fact of social life. Drawing on Peterson’s argument that “the violence of the age arose out of the militarization of otherwise technical questions of government” (156), the chapter demonstrates that much of the era’s brutality emerged not from a genocidal machinery but from everyday encounters between soldiers and citizens.

The final chapters explore the cultural work that patriotic Ugandans undertook to “liberate” the nation’s heritage. Amin’s global ambitions frame Chapter Seven, which shows how he imagined himself at the center of international liberation struggles and how ordinary Ugandans contributed to this work, illustrated through the collages of Peter Wankulu, a pan-Africanist artist inspired by the 1975 OAU conference in Kampala. Cultural governance comes to the fore in Chapter Eight, which traces the regime’s efforts to identify traditions that could be claimed as national property and examines the work of Christian theologian John Mbiti, whose research on African Traditional Religions and advocacy for religious unity provided “a theological framework for the Amin regime’s coercive program of religious unification” (205). Chapter Nine turns to the institutions that produced public memory, highlighting the largely invisible and uncompensated labor of curators and archivists who expanded memorial sites and local museums to reshape Uganda’s historical narrative. These dynamics are illustrated through John Tumusiime, a culture officer in Kigezi who engaged in memorialization efforts in service to the regime. Resistance reappears in Chapter Ten through the Rwenzururu separatist movement based in the Rwenzori Mountains along the Uganda-Zaire border. Its leaders developed a small but durable media infrastructure that upheld their patriotism, encouraged critical listening to Amin’s broadcasts, and created an alternative information network that demystified official propaganda. With their own heroes, memorials, and archives, the Rwenzururu fashioned a distinct political identity that enabled the kingdom to endure, and ultimately outlast, Amin’s regime. The concluding chapter follows the collapse of the dictatorship and considers how Ugandans have curated, memorialized, and debated the meaning of the Amin years.

A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda makes a substantial contribution to the historiography of the Amin years by grounding its narrative in archival materials that, until Peterson’s team preserved them, had scarcely been utilized by historians. His engagement with district-level records, personnel files, and the scattered documentary traces left by civil servants enables analytical possibilities that were previously impossible. These sources allow him to recover the routines, negotiations, and administrative improvisations that sustained the state, offering a view of Amin’s Uganda that extends well beyond the familiar focus on violence and spectacle. The book’s narrative clarity and methodological range make it a valuable resource for scholars seeking to understand how authoritarian rule was enacted through everyday bureaucratic labor.

The study also raises important questions about what it means to write a “popular history” of a period so often framed through myth, rumor, and global fascination. By foregrounding the experiences of ordinary civil servants and activists and drawing on archives that were nearly lost to decay, Peterson reconstructs a history that is both accessible and deeply grounded in the material record. His attention to the visual archive, especially the 2015 photographic cache and the exhibitions that emerged from it, underscores how the Amin years continue to be curated and contested in the present.

One implication of this evidentiary landscape is the need to recognize how the surviving archive shapes what can be known about the period. Peterson is forthright about the fact that most of the available sources were produced by men, and while he incorporates interviews with several notable women, the history that emerges is necessarily filtered through predominantly male voices. This is not a limitation of the study so much as a reminder of the structural silences embedded in the archive itself. It points to the importance of seeking women’s perspectives in places where the formal record falls quiet to deepen our understanding of how Ugandans experienced and interpreted life under Amin’s rule. Attending to these silences only underscores the depth and care of Peterson’s research, which makes this a study that will become indispensable to historians of Uganda and of postcolonial statecraft more broadly. This book will also be valuable to historians of Uganda and to scholars of militarism, authoritarian politics, and the politics of memory more broadly. Because of its readability, it will also appeal to generalist readers, including those drawn to popular histories of the period.