Enforced Disappearances, Colonial Legacies and Political Affect in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya (original) (raw)

Dramatized and Structural Violence within the Axis of Citizenship: An Ethnographic Exploration into Eastleigh, Nairobi.

This research is an ethnographic study into the processes of violence in contemporary Nairobi, Kenya. The ethnographic investigation was primarily focused on the residents of Eastleigh and its neighbouring districts. The ethnographic matierial taken from Eastleigh indicated that violence within that context appeared in two forms: dramatized and structural. Those two forms were a result of the observed and ongoing acts of police brutality, terrorist actions, gross inequalities, deep-rooted corruption and ethnic marginalization. Dramatized violence and structural violence were both used as theoretical tools to analyse these forms of violence taken from the ethnographic data. However, from the interlocutors’ stories regarding violence, the notion of citizenship arose as an intersecting feature between dramatized and structural violence. Thus, citizenship became a theoretical axis which connected strucutural violence and dramatized violence. Citizenship worked as a frame to observe how an act of dramatized violence could result in a reduction of one’s agency, in turn maintaining the victim as marginalised and therefore more prone to the forces of structural violence. In the case of Somalis in Eastleigh, police violence distinguished them as lesser or non-citizens. A reduced citizenship maintained a constrained agency, making one more suseptable to structural violence. Therefore, dramatized and structural violence interact with one another within the intersection of citizenship.

Boundary anxieties and infrastructures of violence: Somali identity in post-Westgate Kenya

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

This article explores infrastructures of violence created by ongoing contestations around (in) security related to violent insurgency in Kenya. It draws on public discourses and policy responses emerging from the September 2013 terror attack at Westgate in Nairobi, Kenya. By exploring the connection between public discourses on resolving (in) security, this article explores the security policies developed to cordon off particular geographical sites and construct Kenyan Somalis as the "other" ostensibly to secure the country. I argue that security discourses and resultant policies produce fluid security infrastructures. This is evident in a move from a focus on physical security infrastructure evident in "boots on the ground" and visible security sector presence, to less visible forms of security which rely to a great extent on surveillance both by the state and citizens.

“The Post-Election Violence Has Brought Shame on This Place”: Narratives, Place, and Moral Violence in Western Kenya

African Studies Review, 2018

This article explores the intersections of violence, morality, and place to theorize the notion of moral violence. Using narratives collected during ethnographic research in a highway town in Kenya, it suggests that when people offer moralizing sentiments about this locality they are pointing to (and sometimes reproducing) the effects of and anxieties about the decades of violence and inequalities that have engulfed the lives of the residents. Particular attention is paid to the way in which narratives about political/ethnic violence and HIV/AIDS have blended to create and sustain moral violence as a chronic and particular, historically embedded variant of structural violence. Résumé: Cet article explore les confluences de la violence et de la moralité ainsi que le lieu où il est possible de théoriser la notion de violence morale. En utilisant des récits recueillis lors d'une recherche ethnographique dans une ville du Kenya, cet article suggère que lorsque les gens expriment des sentiments moralisateurs à propos de cette localité, ils signalent (et parfois reproduisent) les effets et les angoisses de décennies de violence et d'inégalités qui ont submergées la vie des résidents. Une attention particulière est accordée à la manière dont les récits sur la violence politique / ethnique et le VIH / SIDA se sont mélangés pour créer et maintenir la violence morale en tant que variante chronique et particulière, historiquement intégrée à la violence structurelle.

We are not Kenyans extra judicial killings manhood and citizenship in Mathare a Nairobi ghetto

This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association of young ghetto men with violence and ethnic politics—i.e. as ‘thugs for hire’. One of my main discoveries was that work and manhood are at least as important to grasp processes of group formation among them. After this, the article delves into the question of how to understand the narratives that legitimise and perpetuate this particular form of state violence. It concludes by discussing how processes of subjectivation that constitute, and are constituted by, the dominant discourse on citizenship produce positions of non-citizenship ascribed to ghetto residents, and in particular to young ghetto men.

A predisposed view: State violence, human rights organisations and the invisibility of the poor in Nairobi

African Human Rights Law Journal

The article examines the challenges faced by human rights organisations in documenting cases of torture, focusing on the particular example of Kenya. The analysis is situated in the context of both widespread human rights violations and a vibrant human rights community in Kenya. There is considerable evidence that the urban poor are particularly vulnerable to torture and ill-treatment. However, the article suggests that human rights organisations often fail systematically to document the experiences of survivors living in conditions of poverty. The empirical material for this article was produced during three stages of data collection between May 2014 and September 2016, including a household survey examining

Violent place-making: How Kenya's post-election violence transforms a worker's settlement at Lake Naivasha

Lang, B. & Sakdapolrak, P. (2015): Violent place making: How Kenya’s post-election violence transforms a worker’s settlement at Lake Naivasha. In: Political Geography. (accepted)

Events of violence significantly influence the identity of places. Post-conflict areas evoke specific meanings and emotions, and the narratives of violent events have profound effects on the individual and collective interpretations of the venues of violence. This paper addresses the interdependent relation between violence and place, considering the structural and multi-scalar conditions of a relational and discursive making of places. By linking them with an empirically grounded analysis of the materialisation of violence, we follow Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s (2010) claim for a more grounded study of place-specific causes for violent conflict. We employ an empirical example of violent conflict, the post-election violence in Kenya 2007/08, and look into one of its venues, a poor and heterogeneous workers’ settlement at Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Considering the specific socio-political setting in Kenya, we examine (a) the factors that explain why the violence broke out at that place in particular. We synthesise the structural conditions that determined the violence, and which still regulate social life at present, with the individual accounts of people directly or indirectly involved in the violence in Naivasha. We look at (b) how the experience of violence has influenced the imaginations of the place, and if these localised imprints of violence in Naivasha continue to regulate social and spatial (re)organisation after the events. The study reveals that politically instigated societal divides continue to exist, and that memories of the violence induce intensified processes of segregation at the surveyed settlement during times of political uncertainty.

Making Sense of Violence in the “Badlands” of Kenya

Anthropology and Humanism, 2009

In this article, I situate violent conflict affecting pastoralists in northern Kenya in the context of media representations of violent incidents and the relationship that many Kenyans perceive between such incidents and election politics. I argue that media representations are implicated in cycles of violent conflict through erasure and misrecognition. Most crucially, media representations tend to focus on cultural stereotypes that tacitly legitimate ongoing violence by explaining it away as timeless and cultural. These unidimensional representations can distract from the culpability of political elites and from the role of economic and political disenfranchisement in sustaining violence. They can also mask the ways in which some elites benefit from the propagation of cultural stereotypes even while deliberately engaging in manipulation of ethnic fault lines. Finally, I argue that these already ubiquitous representations hinging on cultural stereotypes contribute to a global politics of marginalization, within which so-called indigenous violence is simultaneously politically expedient, routine, and forgettable.

Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2022

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of "terrorism" and its supposed remedy-"counterterrorism"-have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country's military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya's national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country's Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as "wombs" of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya's counterterror state is (re) assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.

To-Live-As-Other-Kenyans-Do-A-Study-Of-The-Reparative-Demands-Of-Kenyan-Victims-Of-Human-Rights-Violations

Human Rights Documents online

The author has worked with victims of conflict in a range of contexts in Asia and Africa over the last decade, with an emphasis on both the use of ethnographic methodologies to understand how victims' needs and priorities can drive processes to address legacies of violence and on victim mobilization. Acknowledgements ICTJ sincerely thanks the partners who made the research presented in this report possible. These include the governments of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg, as well as a range of partner agencies and victims' groups and representatives in Nairobi and elsewhere in Kenya, including the Internal Displaced Persons Network,

Suffering in silence: counter-productivity of Kenya's war on terror at the Kenya coast

Journal of the British Academy

This article examines the detrimental effects of Kenya's wide-ranging policies, strategies and tactics of waging the war on terror at the Kenya coast. The 'war' is waged through police-related killings and enforced disappearances and is becoming counterproductive as it is contributing to a loss of citizenship rights for an increasing segment of the population. These grievances are rarely portrayed in the public sphere but continue to manifest in the suffering of families, livelihood losses, increased stigmatisation and, most importantly, through violation of the citizenship rights of widows and their orphaned children. Using interview data from the Kenya coast, the article attempts to shift beyond perceiving women and young people as perpetrators of violence to seeing them as silent victims of the war on terror. The article analyses these dynamics from community and civil society perspectives. It contributes to the emerging literature on women and violent extremism by ex...