Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the Special Collection ‘Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation'. It focuses on youth and the heterogenous ways this social category responds to inordinate state action. Specifically, we foreground the various roles the Kenyan state has played in the construction and politicization of Kenyan youth across time and space. The introduction frames the papers in the Special Collection within a three-pronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similar experiences of state surveillance and violence warrant analyzing them through a comparative lens. Secondly, we reject ahistorical renderings of youth politics often presented in youth bulge studies, arguing that such analyses have served to disregard and delegitimize the political grievances of Kenyan youth and flatten the diversity of their political activities. Finally we call for an approach to the study of youth politics, which seeks to expand ‘the parameters of the political’, taking oft-neglected informal spaces of youth political activity as important discursive and material sites of investigation. Taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers provide a nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• heterogeneity
• political agency
• securitization
• Kenya

Acknowledgements

The special collection emerged from a workshop organized at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi in December 2017. Not all papers in this Special Collection were part of the workshop, and not all workshop presenters are included here. This notwithstanding, all workshop participants have contributed to the wider discussions captured within this Collection: about how the Kenyan state has discursively constructed and materially responded to youth as potentiating a radical and/or criminal cohort. We are grateful for all of their contributions. Special thanks to Maria Gabriela Castaneda for her research assistance. Finally, we would also like to thank the Editorial Board of the Journal of Eastern African Studies and the Readers of this collection for their support and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Mutunga, “Saba Saba at 30”.

2 Kahura, “The Gains We Have Lost.”

3 Since the “handshake” agreement between political rivals Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta in 2018, which brought together Uhuru’s ruling Jubilee party and large sections of the Raila headed coalition party Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) there has been effectively no formal opposition in Kenya. This has led many to conclude that we are back to a one party state. For more on this see Mutunga 2020.

4 For more of the Citizen Demands, see here: https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/solidarity/citizens-demands-by-the-social-justice-movement-in-kenya/

5 Cf. Sukarieh and Tannock, “The Globalization of Youth”.

6 Ibid.

7 Lonsdale, “Agency in Tight Corners.”

8 Melchiorre, Building Nations, 19.

9 Schatzberg, “Political Legitimacy in Central Africa,” 71.

10 Kimari, “The ‘Youth Bulge’ Discourse,” 23; Kimari, “Activists, Care Work,” 23.

11 Mwangola, “Leaders of Tomorrow?” 137.

12 Bourdieu, Questions in Sociology, 96–7.

13 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” 19.

14 Bourdieu, Questions in Sociology, 95; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” 20.

15 Kirschner, “Youth Terror or Terrorized Youth,” 369; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures”; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy.

16 Ighobor, “Africa’s Youth”.

17 Cincotta, “Half a Chance,” 10; Cincotta et al., “The Security Demographic,” 3; Botha, Terrorism in Kenya and Uganda.

18 Otuka, “Kenya’s Youth Percentage”.

19 British Council, Next Generation Kenya.

20 Muna et al., “Deconstructing Intergenerational Politics,” 1378–94; Mwangola, “Leaders of Tomorrow?” 137.

21 Kagwanja, “Clash of Generations?” 83–108; Rasmussen, “Mungiki as Youth Movement.”

22 Willis and Gona, “Pwani C Kenya?”; Anderson and McKnight, “Understanding al-Shabaab,” 536–57; Hansen, “Al-Shabaab in Somalia.”

23 Melchiorre, “Creating a ‘Monster’.”

24 Kagwanja, “Clash of Generations?” 83–108; Schubert, “Hybrid Security Governance, Post-election”; Throup and Hornsby, Multiparty Democracy in Kenya, 197; Kagwanja, “Politics of Marionettes,” 85.

25 King et al., “Seeing Like Students”.

26 Žák, “Building a Culture of Resistance”.

27 Interview, Gary Fuller in Melchiorre, “Building Nations,” 11.

28 Goldstone, “Youth Bulges”.

29 Fuller and Pitts, “Youth Cohorts and Political,” 9–22; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Cincotta et al., “The Security Demographic,” 45–7.

30 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; El Kenz, “Youth and Violence”; Goldstone, “Demography, Environment and Security”; Urdal, “A Clash of Generations?”.

31 Cincotta et al,, The Security Demographic: Population, 45–7; Wagschal and Metz, “A Demographic Peace? Youth,” 55–97; Goldstone, “A Demographic Peace?” 95.

32 Goldstone, “A Demographic Peace?”; Urdal, “A Clash of Generations?” 607–29.

33 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Lia, Globalization and the Future.

34 Cincotta and Doces , “The Age-Structural Maturity,” 98–116; Weber, “Demography and Democracy,” 335–57.

35 Sukarieh and Tannock, The Global Securitization, 587.

36 Venkatesh and Kassmir, Youth, Globalization.

37 Sommers, “Governance, Security and Culture,” 141.

38 Seekings, Heroes or Villains?; Durham, “Youth and the Social”; Kirschner, “Youth Terror or Terrorized Youth”.

39 Sommers, “Governance, Security and Culture,” 296; Gavin, “Africa’s Restless Youth,” 69–83.

40 Sommers, “Governance, Security and Culture,” 297.

41 Barker and Ricardo, “Young Men,” 181.

42 Sommers, “Governance, Security and Culture,” 296.

43 Gavin, “Africa’s Restless Youth,”74.

44 Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures,” 3; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth,” 20; Mwangola, “Leaders of tomorrow?” 129–63.

45 Abbink, Vanguard or Vandals; Abdullah, “Bush Path to Destruction,” 203–35; Anderson, “Vigilantes, Violence,” 531–55; Kagwanja, “Clash of Generations?”; Kirschner, “Youth Terror or Terrorized Youth,” 369 ; Meagher, “Hijacking Civil Society,” 89–115; Rasmussen, “We are the True Blood of Mau Mau”; Richards, Fighting for the Rain.

46 Seekings, “Heroes or Villains?”; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures”.

47 Lund, “Twilight Institutions”.

48 Rasmussen, “Inside the System”; Stacey and Lund, “State of Slum”; Thieme, “The Hustle”.

49 Lauterbach, “Becoming a Pastor”.

50 Fredericks, “The Old Man is Dead”.

51 Melchiorre, “Building Nations, Making Youth”, 18.

52 Durham, “Youth and the Social”, 114.

53 Whittaker, “Youth on the Margins”.

54 Melchiorre, “'A New Animal’”.

55 Abdullah, “Bush Path to Destruction”; Argenti, “Youth in Africa”; Burgess and Burton, “Introduction”; Christiansen, Utas and Vigh, “Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood”; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony”; Honwana and De Boeck, “Makers and Breakers”; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures”; El Kenz, “Youth and Violence”; Honwana, “The Time of Youth”; Seekings, “Heroes and Villains?”; Waller, “Rebellious Youth in Colonial Africa”.

56 Burgess and Burton, “Introduction,” 1; Honwana and De Boeck, “Makers and Breakers,” 5; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures,” 2; Gavin, “Africa’s Restless Youth,” 69; Honwana, “The Time of Youth,” 14; Kirschner, “Youth Terror or Terrorized Youth,” 369.

57 Durham, “Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa,” 113.

58 Simone, “Waiting in African Cities,” 98.

59 Honwana, “The Time of Youth,” 86.

60 Ibid.; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Reflections on Youth”; De Boeck and Plissart, “Kinshasa”; Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures”.

61 Durham, “Disappearing Youth,” 589–605.

62 Kimari, “War-talk”; Žák, “Building a Culture of Resistance”.

63 Christiansen, Utas and Vigh, “Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood”.

64 Utas, “Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering”, 403–30; Vigh, “Motion Squared,” 419–38; Durham, “Dissapearing Youth,” 589–605.

65 Kimari, “War-talk”.

66 Rasmussen and Van Stepele, “Our Time to Recover”.