This article explores the relationship between security and statehood in Africa by examining the role different actors expect the state to play in governing insecurity. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in northern Uganda’s borderland, we argue that local articulations of security arenas and responsibilities play an important role in the negotiation and constitution of state authority – and reveal the degree to which notions of Weberian statehood have been internalised in postcolonial societies. We focus, in this regard, on discourses around witchcraft, or witchcrafts – an issue framed in the language of security by many individuals and communities but rarely by state or international aid institutions. We argue that understandings of responsibility for dealing with witchcraft concerns and cases reveal the complex manner in which the edges of statehood are constructed. Communities accept and understand that governing witchcraft is beyond the security remit of the ‘modern’ state but nonetheless seek to incorporate it, or appropriate its officers and institutions, into witchcraft-related local governance mechanisms.