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The article focuses on development plans that are premised on scaling up from sweatshops in Kenya and Ethiopia. Topics include Ethiopia attempts to attract foreign capital for its apparel industry by trumpeting the lowest wages as its comparative advantage, Ethiopia's garment sector has no statutory minimum wage; instead, the working minimum is tied to the lowest wages for government employees, and Kenya's government is planning to develop horizontal industrial clusters that build on local strengths, with investments in tanneries and meat, dairy, and leather processing plants.

Two issues of Kwani? Journal published in 2008 foreground the Mungiki cult in different modes. The cult identifies with the Kikuyu community and is associated with Kenya's 2007/2008 Post-Election Violence (PEV). Narrating national violence forms part of how postcolonial nations imagine themselves. And yet past research ignores the Mungiki cult's discourses in Kwani?'s publications. Drawing from popular culture theory, and recognising ethnic violence as an aspect of Kenya's socio-political context, this article examines the way Kwani? Journal portrays the Mungiki cult's violence during Kenya's contested 2007 elections. The paper finds out whether the depiction is accidental or intentional by also referring to two Mungiki texts published in Kwani? before and after the election violence. I discuss the implications of such portrayal and its impact in the imaginaries on identity and national belonging in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary international criminal law suggests that head of state immunity does not extend to atrocity crimes, but the executive's office continues to be the safest place for suspected perpetrators. Moreover, indicted suspects can use the threat of international accountability to win democratically contested elections. This article asks how suspects and their surrogates translate an indictment from an international criminal tribunal into an electoral victory and suggests that the path between an indictment and electoral victory unfolds in one of two ways: (1) the consolidation of existing coalitions around the indicted suspects and their allies; or (2) the creation of new coalitions that span existing cleavages. The article evaluates these assumptions through two cases: Lebanon and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and Kenya and the International Criminal Court. These two decidedly different cases exemplify the ways in which coalitional politics shield suspects international accountability and reward them with high office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2010, Kenyans voted to adopt a new Constitution. Amongst its many provisions was devolved governance, which established 47 independent counties each led by a directly elected governor and legislative assembly. The Constitution also sought to address the country's 'land question' by radically reworking land institutions and administration. The Constitution introduced an independent body, the National Land Commission, empowered to oversee public land management and allocation. Constitutional provisions devolved significant powers and responsibilities in land management and planning to the county level. These reforms – stressing transparency, accountability and greater community participation in land planning and administration – were intended to halt endemic corruption at the Ministry of Lands, address land injustices, enhance tenure security, and facilitate better-functioning land markets. This paper examines the unfolding institutional reform around land pursuant to the 2010 Constitution. It explores the political economy of land in Kenya by examining incentives for and impediments to institutional change toward better land management and long sought-after land justice. As with many reforms adopted throughout the Global South, Kenya's land reforms were premised on 'getting the incentives right'. Incentivising behaviour is extremely complicated in a sector as complex, dynamic and profitable as the land sector. The research highlights the role of urban planners, actors rarely examined in the literature on Kenya's land politics. Kenya's faltering land reform is a result of the internal conflicting incentives of land actors and the fact that no legal reform will be sufficient to alter entrenched behaviour without renewed pressure from a broad-based land justice/human rights movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I offer a reception study of the varied responses to and interpretations of a burning church in the town of Eldoret following the 2007 Kenya presidential election. Specifıcally, I study responses from the U.S. and British media, U.S. offıcials, and Kenyan politicians. Myanalysis illuminates how different uses of the term "genocide" mobilize particular sensibilities about the relation between ethnicity and politics and demonstrates how the label of genocide constrains interpretations of violence. In the media and discourse of U.S. politicians, the identifıcation or denial of genocide was made by setting ethnicity and politics as opposing explanatory factors of the violence. Discourses in Kenya, however, demonstrate that understanding the violence required understanding the intersection and permeability of these same categories. This analysis has important implications for understanding how conflicts are and are not named genocide. It demonstrates the importance of attending to the nuanced rhetoric of genocide and calls our attention to the contingent relationships among ethnicity, politics, and genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-visits Kenyan history at the point of transition to independence but this time, with a focus on women's history. It examines the political careers of the first African women in colonial Kenya to be nominated to Kenya's colonial-era LEGCO (Legislative Council). They were nominees of the country's governor. The process that led to their nominations was neither transparent nor consultative, their terms were short and the extent to which they fostered broader working alliances with women outside the LEGCO was equally limited. These were the consequences of a nomination process that served the cosmetic interests of the state in the absence of a bolder effort to address the lack of women in the LEGCO, and the broader structural problems that cultivated gender inequalities which were then manifested in the low-level of women's involvement in the country's political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who are Africa's swing voters? This article argues that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, core and swing are defined by whether ethnic groups have a co-ethnic leader in the election. For members of ethnic groups with a co-ethnic in the race, there is typically less uncertainty about which party or candidate will best represent the group's interests. For members of groups without a co-ethnic in the race, uncertainty is often greater, making these voters potentially more receptive to campaign persuasion and more likely to change voting intentions during the campaign. Consistent with these expectations, panel data from Kenya's 2013 presidential election shows that voters from groups without a co-ethnic in the race were more than two and a half times more likely to change their voting intentions during the campaign period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the evolution of an Islamist ideology in Kenya's public discourse, putting Islamist ideas within a longer history of Muslim politics than most other studies. Specifically, it examines internal debates amongst the minority Muslim population of Kenya, and debates between Muslims and the state and Muslims and the wider Christian public, regarding how to improve the Muslim condition in a Christian-dominated country. The immediate background for the emergence of Islamist ideas is then discussed through an examination of trends since the 1990s, including increased contestations of religious and political authority, and responses to Muslim activism by the state and the wider Christian public. The article concludes that Islamist politics in Kenya, and elsewhere, are more often than not a result of local histories as much as they are part of a global Muslim 'victimization' narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Kenya's independence, its political leadership has overly been dominated by men. Attempts to have increased women participation in the political leadership came from various lobby groups which demanded affirmative action. The provision for the Two-Thirds Gender Rule in the 2010 constitution of Kenya was therefore a milestone in addressing gender disparity in Kenya's political space. The two thirds gender rule was to be achieved through having more women successfully elected members of Parliament or nominated for elections of the members of the National Assembly. Although the 2013 and 2017 general elections were conducted under the 2010 Constitution, the two thirds gender rule is yet to be realized both in the National Assembly and the Senate, making the composition of Parliament unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the Constitution is not explicit on the mechanism of achieving the gender rule in Parliament but provides for the necessary legislation to be enacted towards the same. Attempts by parliament to enact legislation to address the constitutional crisis with regard to its composition has continually been thwarted by lack of quorum as members of parliament absent themselves from the voting process. While appreciating possible institutional weaknesses and complexities relating to the patrimonial nature of the Kenyan social and political landscape, the author argues that, achievement of increased women participation in political leadership through the two-thirds gender rule is dependent on political parties as primary institutions, charged with the most strategic responsibility of selecting, preparing and supporting candidates for elections, as well as organizing and shaping politics in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political fallout from the Arab spring and the growth of Salafism elsewhere have sparked a new debate about the merits of political Salafism. This article retraces the trajectory of political Salafism in Kenya between the early 1990s and the most recent elections in 2017. It focuses on two Salafi-led associations, the Council of Imams and Preachers in Kenya (CIPK) and the National Muslim Leaders Forum (NAMLEF). It notes two developments: first, the declining efficacy and relevancy of both organizations; and second, and as a result of the former, the inadvertent contribution of political Salafism to the radicalization of Kenya's Muslim youth in Kenya's coastal region. The study argues that both are an outcome of several interrelated factors, including the CIPK's and NAMLEF's involvement in partisan politics, the neo-patrimonial nature of Kenya's political system, as well as the desire of the CIPK and NAMLEF leaderships to participate in that system and to generate high-ranking public appointments for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the promise of the good governance agenda in African countries since the 1990s rested on reforms aimed at 'getting the institutions right', sometimes by creating regulatory agencies that would be above the fray of partisan politics. Such 'institutional fix' strategies are often frustrated because the new institutions themselves are embedded in existing state structures and power relations. The article argues that implementing Kenya's land law reforms in the 2012–2016 period illustrates this dynamic. In Kenya, democratic structures and the 2010 constitutional devolution of power to county governments created a complex institutional playing field, the contours of which shaped the course of reform. Diverse actors in both administrative and representative institutions of the state, at both the national and county levels, were empowered as 'veto players' whose consent and cooperation was required to realize the reform mandate. An analysis of land administration reform in eight Kenyan counties shows how veto players were able to slow or curtail the implementation of the new land laws. Theories of African politics that focus on informal power networks and state incapacity may miss the extent to which formal state structures and the actors empowered within them can shape the course of reform, either by thwarting the reformist thrust of new laws or by trying to harness their reformist potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the distribution of power among public, private and criminal interests invested in Mombasa port. It approaches Kenya as a gatekeeper state, in which national elites compete to control the country's points of interaction with the rest of the world. Mombasa's controversial private dry ports are used to highlight (1) how the opportunity to profit from inefficiencies in container storage has been distributed among the political elite, and (2) how the development of the country's principal seaport not only reflects Kenya's underlying political settlements, but is one of the key sites in which those settlements are tested and reshaped. The case exposes a dynamic interaction between Kenya's shifting political settlement on the one hand, and the gate itself – Mombasa port's physical infrastructure and regulations – on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the politics of (self-)referentiality on the Kenyan weblog kenyanpundit.com during the elections of 2007 and their violent aftermath. It discusses news reporting on this website through the concept of a communication circuit, and the changing forms of address by conceptualising the narrative as a social diary. These two parallel routes of interpretation, the first spatial and the second temporal, are framed in the wider context of the role of the media during the Kenyan electoral period. The analysis shows the boundaries between news producers and publics to be blurred, even if the blogger Kenyan Pundit controlled the final publication of the writing in her function as gate-keeper to the blog. The online space provides the possibility for a participatory readership that is in principle limitless, but it is shown that this online space does not render older axes of debate - such as the nation and ethnicity - obsolete. I argue that the weblog's community engage in evaluative and emotive debates about the news. However, these debates do not constitute a uniform whole; rather, the blog posts and comments on Kenyanpundit.com form a narrative diary that establishes the weblog as processual rather than static. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts the securitisation theory to examine the relationship among securitisation, non-refoulement, a peremptory norm, and the rule of law in Kenya. The arguments raised are that Somali refugees and refugee camps predominantly occupied by Somalis are falsely, in blanket fashion, socially constructed as abetting terrorism hence existential threats to national security so that the state can prioritise the implementation of refoulement, a norm-violating counterterrorism measure. The rights of Somali refugees and rule of law have been violated in the context of legality and legal certainty, discretionary powers, equality before the law and non-discrimination. It is only with regard to access to justice that the rights of Somali refugees have been protected under both domestic and international law. Kenya has, therefore, derogated from the doctrine of non-refoulement hence violating the rule of law domestically and internationally. The conclusion offers ways of mitigating the adverse effects of securitisation on non-refoulement and the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the problems of public participation in conserving a Ramsar site at the Tana Delta in southeastern Kenya. Given no participation of the public in government initiatives so far, we attempted to find out what had prevented local people from cooperating with responsible government bodies. Using empirical evidence that we obtained from fieldworks, questionnaire surveys, and workshops, we found that the low participation was not mainly due to local people’s unwillingness to conserve natural resources. Instead, we found that they were strongly interested in wetland resources conservation as long as their customary rights to governing resources are sufficiently recognized. We also documented how these local people managed their resources. The Kenya Wildlife Service and the National Museum of Kenya are the main government bodies to promote public participation, but we found that these agencies had not done effective communication works among local people. Our survey then clarified what sources of information can be most effective in communicating with local people in the Tana Delta. Finally, we discuss how the problems of public participation can be solved or reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the way a “politics of belonging” has been enacted in recent years in Kenya, and what this means for the Somali population of the country. Even though Kenyan Somalis have been treated as “ambiguous citizens” since independence, the question for many of them is not so much if they belong to Kenya, but rather how. In the multi-ethnic state of Kenya, there are other groups as well who are “ambiguous citizens” - including Asians, Whites, Nubians and Arabs - for whom two main dimensions along which “Kenyanness” is constructed come into the foreground: a racial dimension and a cultural dimension. Kenyan Somalis seem to be ambiguous in both of them. Following McIntosh’s contention that one way to claim “Kenyanness” is to appeal to “a civic nationalism, in which all groups invested in the nation are equally welcome”, this article argues - based on ethnographic data gathered since 2010 as well as archival sources - that many Kenyan Somalis are ready to take this possibility up, if they have the chance to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on elections in Kenya and analyses the use of technology and the exploitation of personal data in both the electoral process and campaigning. We only need to look to Kenya's election history to understand why it is important. The 2007/2008 election resulted in violence that killed over 1,000 people and displaced over 600,000. The 2013 election was relatively peaceful, but marked the rise of online "hate speech" that exploited ethnic tensions. The 2017 election result was annulled and rerun amidst great tension and a death toll of at least 33 people, while targeted online political adverts played on national fears of further violence. The essay concludes with an outline of the expected minimum protections and safeguards, which can be applied globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the National Theatre of Kenya, and considers the debate over what constitutes a national theatre. Topics discussed include the founding of the Kamirithu Community Education and Cultural Center, the creation of the National Theatre in 1952, and the theatre as an image of how an inclusive, people-based democracy should work.

This paper utilizes document analysis, including the review of the Constitution of Kenya and acts of Parliament and other relevant literature to examine the implications of a centralized police service in a decentralized system of government, and it evaluates the lateral relationships between the national government holders of police power and county government executives. The paper also highlights the convoluted pecking order and lateral disharmony between the national government police commanders at the county level, and county government leaders. The findings support the necessity of creating law enforcement agencies for entities that have law-making responsibilities, and offer recommendations for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ethnicity as an issue prevailing upon the Kenyan society and its implication on the social, economic and political dimensions in Kenya. Devolved ethnicity has been seen to be on the arise since the county's independence (1963) to date and therefore the distrust among communities is seen as an impediment to the socio-economic and political developments in Kenya. Moreover, the issues that arise include marginalization of minority ethnic communities towards accessing resources. Uneven distribution of national resources has led to underdevelopment of regions in Kenya thereby bring about regional imbalance in terms of distribution of national resources, which has negatively affected socio-economic development of the country. Negative ethnicity brings about marginalization, distrust and heightens ethnic tensions and this eventually leads to conflict, for example, the 1992, 1997 and the 2007/2008 post-election violence over the sharing and allocation of power and national resources. This paper examines ways in which ethnic problems in Kenya have been attributed to the social, economic and political perspectives and therefore provides the solution/medicine towards negative ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devolution in Kenya has had ramification on local governments especially urban areas. Kisumu City is unique as the only city with a rural county hinterland. It has created a challenge for the County Executive in terms of managing County expectations and City interests in terms of governance. This paper looks at Kisumu in terms of the governance structures, spatial planning and finance as key aspects of having an effective city management and governance. It points out the gaps that exist within the legal framework that operationalizes the devolved structures for the city. It allows for an appreciation of the management and governance structures of the city as it strives to put in place systems that would make devolution for the city to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are often perceived to provide the magic bullet to complex societal problems including alternative approaches that ensure good governance. Fresh new research is therefore needed due to the prevailing paradox of escalating governance challenges in Kenya despite CSOs efforts to address the same. This paper specifically seeks to understand mechanisms that CSOs use as they seek to intervene in governance issues in Kenya. It links persistent poor governance happening at the counties to inadequate mechanisms used by CSOs. It argues that CSOs have not been bold enough to confront poor governance but, instead, have used superficial mechanisms with little outcomes. They have particularly focused on providing trainings and creating awareness and have shied away from more direct engagement with poor governance such as monitoring utilization of public funds. The study methodology involved a survey, focus group discussions, and in‐depth face to face interviews. The tools used included a survey questionnaire, Focus Group Discussion guide and In‐depth Interview guide. Among the recommendations are that CSOs need to go beyond creating awareness and trainings and engage with governance issues more directly using well‐tried mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In anthropology and related fields, “ruin” and “decay” are terms that are often used interchangeably. By paying close attention to the materiality and politics of dirt and decay in a colonial-era housing estate in Nairobi, Kenya, this article argues for their uncoupling. Instead of implying loss or oblivion, decay is explored as a process of accumulation: an excess that constitutes a material history. Remains, rubbish and dirt continue to be active in the present, effecting and constraining certain atmospheres, attitudes and politics. Drawing a distinction between “urban decay” as a policy category and as a material process, the article also considers what happens if these remains are wiped away in schemes of urban renewal. The loss usually associated with ruination may emanate not so much from decay as from its elimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya stands tragically poised between an illiberal democracy and an illiberal opposition intent on creating political ferment as a means of securing power-sharing arrangements or fresh elections. Initially praised as the freest and fairest polls conducted in the country since the introduction of competitive multiparty politics in 1991, the August 2017 elections ultimately led to vicious interparty and interethnic disagreements over the outcome of the presidential contest. This outcome was voided by the Supreme Court on the basis of procedural violations in the delivery of results, even as the courts upheld and the public accepted results for the national legislature and at the county level, where the attrition rates of incumbent candidates were highest. To break the impasse, Kenya needs to replace the presidential system with a parliamentary one and to give a centrality to political compromise that befits the country’s ethnically polarized nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The decision by the Government of Kenya in 2013 to increase tax revenue by imposing excise duty of 50 percent on sorghum beer resulted in economic losses for smallholders, the brewery, and the government itself because it effectively killed the value chain. In 2015, the government reversed the policy decision and reduced excise duty to 10 percent. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of this policy decision on the value chain, adaptation by growers and the brewery, and the rationale for this policy change and its reversal.Design/methodology/approach The author analyzes this episode using a conceptual framework derived from complex adaptive systems, focusing on four properties of such systems: sudden, endogenous shocks, interacting agents, and adaptation.Findings The author shows how the nature of politics in Kenya exposed the value chain to endogenous shocks as the result of conflicts between interacting agents, where smallholder farmer organizations were important for successful adaptation. Conflicts between development and political objectives in neo-patrimonial states are sources of complexity and uncertainty in smallholder value chains.Research limitations/implications Complex adaptive systems proved a useful framework to understand decision making by government and business actors in the value chain.Originality/value The paper applies a novel conceptual framework to the analysis of an important value chain in Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2010, Kenya's citizens adopted a new Constitution. Intended to rein in an imperial presidency, the Constitution initiated one of the most ambitious governance reforms seen in Sub-Saharan Africa. ‘Devolution’ establishes 47 counties with extensive powers led by a directly elected governor and legislative assembly. The transition has exposed fault lines as actors struggle over the delineation of power. This paper presents the fight between the National Land Commission and the Ministry of Lands over the right to manage public land in the period 2013–2016. The paper argues that the difficulties associated with land reform arise because of the centrality of land allocation to the maintenance of power in the country. NLC's potential to transform land relations – by addressing land grabbing, effecting land redistribution, and ensuring land access by marginalised groups – is limited. This is due to the paucity of unallocated public land and the continued strength of Kenya's statist land tenure regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper Kenya’s climate change mitigation ambitions are analysed from an energy system perspective, with a focus on the role of renewable and other low-carbon energy technologies. At COP-21 in 2015 in Paris, Kenya has committed to a ‘nationally determined contribution’ of reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in 2030 in comparison to a business-as-usual projection. An efficient exploitation of the country’s renewable energy resources is key to achieving this target. We use the TIAM-ECN model to characterize plausible development pathways for the Kenyan energy mix until 2050 under different climate change mitigation scenarios. We conclude that the power sector can expand with mostly renewable energy options even in the absence of stringent greenhouse gas abatement targets. On the contrary, on the demand side a substantial deployment of low-carbon technologies is triggered only when ambitious emission reduction objectives are in place. The introduction of these technologies entails additional energy system costs, ranging in 2050 from 0.5% to 2% of the country’s GDP. Our analysis supports the feasibility of Kenyan climate management goals, provided that adequate investments in renewable and other low-carbon energy technologies are timely made available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus is on the limitations, politics, and spatiality of statistical knowledge in colonial Kenya, with particular reference to population and agricultural statistics. The objective is to contribute to recent debates surrounding the role of statistics and enumeration within colonial government and, in particular, research emphasizing the uneven nature of colonial statistical knowledge. It is shown that this unevenness took particular forms in a settler colonial context such as Kenya, where state enumeration was enrolled within particular kinds of political contestations and objectives. These centered on the conflicts between settler capitalism and African production, and resulting demands made on the colonial state. Statistical knowledge concentrated on settler production, but was extended to African areas and economic activities in accordance with specific economic and political objectives. This historical perspective helps to explain why the colonial statistical record in Kenya is piecemeal, incomprehensive and largely blind to specificities of 'the urban' as a domain of knowledge and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American enthusiasm for promoting democracy has waned since the longer term consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq became apparent. The neo-cons misplaced confidence in the superiority of their ideals appeared to blind them to lessons from history. Indeed, they might have been more cautious about encouraging electoral transfers of power had they studied experiences following the post-colonial imposition of democracy. This paper draws out some of those lessons, arguing that examples of newly independent sub Saharan African nations highlighted the lag between the notion of universal suffrage and levels of mutual interdependence that enable stable and secure transitions of power. The lag legacy continues to cast a considerable shadow over sub Saharan African politics resulting in elections being accompanied by killings in the pursuit of power by plebiscite. Despite complicity in the roots of these political problems Western governments and international institutions continue with their 'hopeful prognosis'. Rather than confront underlying failings, blame is localised, directed at corruption and 'big men'. Such targeting fails to understand that these factors are indicative of wider problems requiring deeper rooted exploration and consideration. Hence figurational insights are applied in order to gain a broader understanding of long term social processes and activities that result in failures to entrench democracy within political arrangements. Particular attention is placed upon interweaving balances of power, competition and cooperation and we/I which are applied to a number of case studies including South Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores interfaces between language management and devolved governance in Kenya against the backdrop of language management theory and the roles and responsibilities of devolved governance as defined by traditional fiscal federalism, new public management (NPM), public choice, new institutional economics (NIE), and network forms of local governance. This discussion establishes theoretically sound intersections between language and devolved governance, underpinned by the centrality of language in information and knowledge access, sharing and utilisation in governance processes and structures. The article applies this proposition to the language and devolved governance interface in Kenya and identifies engendering active citizenship, accountability and transparency, and mainstreaming indigenous knowledge into governance and development discourses as some of the interfaces between language management and devolved governance in Kenya. The article argues that language management is integral to the optimisation of devolved governance that is responsive, responsible and accountable in Kenya, and possibly elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at music as one of the channels used by oppressive regimes to persuade the public to pledge loyalty to the nation and government of the day while at the same time blinding citizens from acknowledging the social, economic and political realities on the ground. Music composed, performed and accompanied by dance and visual images, and subsequently broadcast through different media channels, can be effective in achieving this mission. This article examines the songTuishangilie Kenya(1984, revised 2012) as an example of the way music and performance in the Kenyan context become tools to efface substantial historical realities in order to project an imagined vision of a united nation. This article draws on Stuart Hall’s argument that music channelled through mass media can instil a sense of patriotism and national consciousness, and Nicholas Cook’s analysis of music in television commercials, to argue that the 2012 remaking ofTuishangilie Kenyaprovides a potential avenue for constructing a kind of double meaning, one overtly intended and one subverted at the end. Through an analysis of the song’s lyrical, musical and visual parameters I demonstrate how the audience is “hoodwinked” but how propaganda can backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Kenyans went to the polls on 8 August, protests over the results brought back memories of the disputed election 10 years prior. While the level of violence and contestation did not reach the same magnitude as a decade ago, recent events have illuminated the tentative nature of the peace that was established in the aftermath of the 2007-08 post-election crisis. While there is no doubt that the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) process was essential in averting further bloodshed in Kenya - what is often overlooked are the significant costs associated with the 2008 agreements. By prioritising stability over democracy, enabling impunity over accountability, and addressing the symptoms of violence as opposed to more proximate causes, the KNDR process left many of the issues that facilitated the 2007 unrest unresolved. Consequently, the underlying causes of instability in Kenya remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Marehan Somali rebellion from 1913 to 1914, and the attempt to pacify the Kenyan colony of Jubaland and bring back the Marehan and other Somali groups under effective colonial control. It explores the problems faced by the colonial government of the East Africa Protectorate and the Colonial Office in dealing with dissident Somali groups that lead to the Marehan Uprising. It also explores Kenya's military actions against Marehan Somalis to end lack of law and order.

Situated in the densely populated former North Nyanza District of western Kenya, Chavakali secondary school was the site where the colonial regime, the nationalist government, and international ‘developmentalists’ attempted to dictate the nature of education and by extension the place of the rural citizenry during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. This goal, however, was not easily achieved because ordinary Kenyans rejected the vocational-agricultural curriculum that school officials and development specialists championed as the ideal education program for rural communities. Chavakali students from Maragoliland, in particular, recognized the inherent contradiction of the Kenyan government's agriculture-as-development model continued from the colonial era – lack of land. Realizing how bankrupt the agrarian development model really was, they used their educational training to enter the wage labor sector on better terms than as simple laborers. Chavakali's nonsensical curriculum thus hardly produced the agrarian revolution that the state hoped would stabilize the countryside in the postcolony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]