Stage Courts and Street Sovereignty: Accident Blame, Debt Discipline, and Platform Friction in Uganda’s Boda Boda Economy

Boda boda stages in Uganda are commonly described as waiting points for motorcycle taxis, yet they also function as street-level institutions that adjudicate disputes and govern everyday urban order. Drawing on ten months of multisited ethnography across four stages in Kampala and Gulu, this article examines how stage leaders and riders resolve accidents, enforce debt repayment, and manage reputational threats amid policing and platform expansion. The analysis shows that stage hearings produce locally binding outcomes through public procedures that assemble evidence, assess credibility, and impose queue-based sanctions and guarantor-backed repayment schedules. Platform records and police documents enter these hearings as hybrid forms of proof, but stage actors retain interpretive authority by translating external traces into local moral vocabularies of responsibility and respect. The article argues that stage courts sustain mobility economies by converting risk and obligation into enforceable social commitments.