“Once you support, you are supported”: Entrepreneurship and reintegration among ex‐prisoners in Gulu, northern Uganda

Abstract

This article explores the divergences between ex-prisoners' use of entrepreneurship as a tool for rebuilding social ties and the vision of entrepreneurship provided by Mission Forward, a European-funded, Ugandan-run nongovernmental organization that provides ex-prisoners with entrepreneurship training. Forty-six interviews were conducted over two months with Mission Forward staff and with ex-prisoners participating in the entrepreneurship training program in Gulu, northern Uganda. These interviews found that Mission Forward's official position, like that of many providers of criminal justice services, was to view crime as resulting from one primary deficiency in personhood: idleness. To rectify this, their policy was to fashion prototypical neoliberal entrepreneurs: self-motivated and self-reliant individualists whose primary concern is making money and who could achieve this goal no matter what the circumstances. In contrast, ex-prisoners experienced a loss of personhood when they became marked as criminals by their friends and neighbors. To address this, ex-prisoners were concerned with using the contracts, exchanges, and interactions associated with their entrepreneurial ventures to rebuild the social ties that their crimes and subsequent incarceration had damaged and thereby reclaim personhood. This article argues that these divergent uses of entrepreneurship as a rehabilitative and reintegrative tool provide new insights into the nature of entrepreneurship and into the establishment and reestablishment of both personhood and social ties through economic exchange.

“Meat and Three”: Business Ownership as an Alternative Form of Work

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