ABSTRACT The Ethiopian military intervention to remove the Union of Islamic Courts from Mogadishu in December 2006 has been interpreted in overlapping narratives of historical-religious conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, proxy war with Eritrea, and counter-terrorism. This article adds another: the Ethiopian government's own dominant narrative of danger at the time. Based on a discourse analysis

ABSTRACT Despite only a minority of Kenya’s African population being literate at the time of independence, letter-writing constituted a significant form of engagement between grassroots political participants and national leaders during decolonisation. This paper sets out to ask why individuals and collaborative groups of writers sent large quantities of letters to their leaders, what they wrote about

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the little discussed democratic period, directly after Sudanese independence in 1956 and preceding the military takeover in 1958. The article uses parliamentary and public discussions around an American aid offer as a lens to understand Sudanese perspectives on decolonisation, independence, dependence, sovereignty, and neo-colonialism in a Cold War context. The

ABSTRACT This article presents a linguistic landscape analysis of pictures taken in Eritrea’s capital Asmara between 2001 and 2018, stemming from the respective periods of Italian, British, Ethiopian and Eritrean rule. The analysis illustrates how these semiotic signs, fossilized as well as contemporary, bear witness of the ways in which language and state ideologies of the country’s respective rulers

ABSTRACT In the 1960s and 1970s, technical advisors participated in postcolonial development efforts and popular internationalism. This article addresses the politics of technical assistance as an entry point for exploring the wider shared histories of Tanzania and Canada. It shows how Canadian advisors reflected on ujamaa, race, and their relationships with Tanzanians. And it charts how lived experiences

ABSTRACT Drawing upon interviews and a variety of newspapers and other media associated with the Sudanese Islamic Movement, this article analyses historic developments in its strategy for the Islamization of the now independent region of southern Sudan with particular reference to the experience of members of the movement from that region. It identifies significant parallels between the colonial and

ABSTRACT Since 2015, Al-Shabaab and the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) have been locked in a violent, protracted stalemate. There is little momentum to pursue a political settlement, with Al-Shabaab rejecting any overtures of dialogue. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from peace and conflict literature and key interviews with clan elders and Al-Shabaab defectors, this article explores two interconnected

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the causes and consequences of the Ethio-Eritrean rapprochement. The causes are both internal (each side had their reasons) and external (under the influence of the UAE and Saudi Arabia). As for the consequences, the peace served as a catalyst of Eritrea’s reintegration: it boosted bilateral visits, had a limited regional snowball effect, lifted the UNSC

ABSTRACT The idea that Kenya is made up of 42(+) tribes is widespread, but the origins, nature and consequences of any list are not well-known. This article compares ethnic classifications in all Kenyan censuses to demonstrate the origins of the ‘42’ in (only) the 1969 census, and the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting. To make sense of why the 42(+) remains significant, I argue

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the strength of African presidentialism. This article studies the resilience of presidential power in Zambia in the face of electoral turnover. Opposition election campaigns, conducted by both the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the Patriotic Front (PF), featured deep constitutional reform as prominent campaign pledges. Nevertheless, after winning the

ABSTRACT Africa’s international borders have been sites of inter-ethnic and inter-state relations and media for material and cultural exchange. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the article illustrates how decades of cross-border insecurity and violence from livestock raiding and tension over pasture and water resources have entrenched a consciousness within a marginalized Turkana community

ABSTRACT Ethiopia has a long history of economic relations in its borderlands. Since the early 1990s, the Ethiopian state began to earnestly entrench its authority in the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands. This study examined the governmentalization of the Ethio-Somaliland borderlands in the post-1991 period. Drawing on official data and key informant interviews, the study identifies several techniques

ABSTRACT This article argues that brokers are key actors in the cross-border livestock trade between Kenya and Somalia, where formal regulations are weak or absent. We elucidate the economic and social rationales for livestock brokerage as well as a series of brokering practices taking place at the intersection of profit making, kinship and trust. Besides producing social capital based on trust, brokers

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of the causes and consequences of the Ethio-Eritrean rapprochement. The causes are both internal (each side had their reasons) and external (under the influence of the UAE and Saudi Arabia). As for the consequences, the peace served as a catalyst of Eritrea’s reintegration: it boosted bilateral visits, had a limited regional snowball effect, lifted the UNSC

ABSTRACT The impact and effects of protracted refugee camps on their host environments in East Africa has been the subject of much academic attention since the late 1990s. Such camps are often viewed as exclusionary spaces that isolate refugees from their host societies. Recent analyses, however, posit such camps as hybrid spaces, with fluid boundaries, that provide socio-economic opportunities and

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of the reintroduction of multiparty politics at the University of Nairobi in the late-1990s. It argues that the reinstatement of Nairobi’s student union (SONU) in 1998 represented a fundamental turning point in the history of student activism in Kenya. SONU’s return served to open space on campus for national political parties, particularly the ruling party

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between livestock taxation and local state formation dynamics in the northern Somali territories. While the economic importance of livestock in Somalia is undisputed, its significance as a source of revenue and legitimacy for public administrations and competing state-building projects has been overlooked. Drawing on fieldwork in Somaliland’s main livestock

ABSTRACT The ‘youth bulge’ that has been observed across much of the Global South has resulted in the drawing of young people, especially young men, as a threat to social order. In Kenya, the ‘spectre of youth radicalization’ is particularly prevalent, and young Somali males have been singled out as a volatile youth demographic. While explanations for the correlation between political instability and

ABSTRACT In Ethiopia, farmland belongs to ‘the people’ (the state) and cannot be sold or bought, but compensatory measures have been introduced for land expropriated for infrastructure and industry. The article analyses processes of valuation and compensation of land in Kombolcha district in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Here numerous projects have affected highly productive farmland over the last

ABSTRACT In this article, I detail how youth in poor urban settlements in Nairobi use a vernacular that I term war-talk. This is a speech, anchored in the Swahili derived urban slang language Sheng, which includes words that reference combat situations. If Sheng, as has been argued, is a generational articulation of unequal spatialized relations in Nairobi, war-talk further indexes the siege that those

ABSTRACT While Kenyan youth comprise the majority of the Kenyan electorate, they are typically either stereotyped as criminals or marginalized, rather than taken seriously as politically important actors. The importance of youth in Kenya, and the gaps in our knowledge about this group, prompt us to investigate their views at the cusp of political becoming. Reporting on a survey of 4,773 secondary school

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

ABSTRACT In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi’s poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Operation Usalama Watch, a counter-terrorism crackdown that was conducted in Eastleigh, the predominately Kenyan-Somali neighbourhood of Nairobi, in April 2014. Using the response to the operation as a case study, it seeks to build on criticisms of the Copenhagen School by arguing that the notion of the ‘speech act’ is limiting when considering alternative media through

ABSTRACT Much of the scholarly work on politics in Zambia’s one-party state stresses the non-competitiveness of its parliamentary elections and holds that politicians were unable to cultivate the power of patronage because the political system was heavily weighted against the practice. This article uses a case study of Michael Sata, an individual politician who was twice elected Member of Parliament

ABSTRACT This article analyses the popular story of the two ‘social bandits’ Osale and Paulo who caused insecurity and fear in Tanganyika’s Usambara Mountains during the 1950s. By comparing various oral accounts of the story and supplementing the sparse archival material available, the paper reveals a narrative of multiple anxieties haboured by the residents of Shambaai during a time of rapid transformation

ABSTRACT Decades of both non-violent and armed struggle did not bring much result to the Oromo quest for political power over the Ethiopian state, and contemporary Oromo politics often appear recondite and discordant. When Abiy Ahmed came to power as the new Prime Minister in April 2018 as the first Oromo politician entering the former imperial palace, many believed it was the Oromo’s turn to rule

ABSTRACT In the early 2010s, Zanzibar and coastal Kenya witnessed the rise of assertive secessionist grassroots movements articulating perceived injustices committed by ‘upcountry’/mainland ruling elites. While on the islands, the Jumuiya ya Uamsho na Mihadhara ya Kiislam (Organisation for Islamic Awareness and Propagation) championed the breaking up of the Tanzanian Union, in Kenya, the Mombasa Republican

ABSTRACT For the last three years, Mozambique has been facing an insurgency in its northern province of Cabo Delgado. There is much confusion and debate as to what is going on. Who are the insurgents, what do they want, and where do they come from? Debates have focused particularly on the role of religion and the external dimension of the insurgency. Drawing on fieldwork from 2018 and 2019, this paper

ABSTRACT Over the course of only a few months in 2006, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) defeated the clan-based faction leaders in Mogadishu and conquered most parts of South-Central Somalia, an achievement unprecedented since the fall of the Somali state in 1991. The ICU’s rapid expansion met with little resistance and the local populations generally received their forces with enthusiasm. Drawing on

ABSTRACT From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, Tanzania experienced an unprecedented crisis characterized by high inflation, unemployment and the shortage of basic commodities. Interviews with contemporaries and the scanty documentary evidence available show that this crisis did not impede small-scale gold mining industry in Nyamongo, Tarime District. On the contrary, mining in Nyamongo boomed during

ABSTRACT From the Derg’s restoration of Meskel Square for its military parades and Meles Zenawi’s Light-Rail Transit (LRT) and condominium social housing projects to Abiy Ahmed’s high-end luxury real estate and urban tourism schemes, megaprojects have collapsed Ethiopia’s political history into an urban bricolage of shifting ideologies and new priorities. At this critical juncture, where questions

ABSTRACT This article analyzes contests among Ethiopian and British imperial agents and their ostensible Somali (and other Muslim) subjects for control over commerce in the Ethiopia-British Somaliland borderlands. British claims of sovereignty over Somalis and other Muslim merchants operating in Ethiopia created a field of hybrid commercial control in which neither Britons nor Ethiopians held complete

ABSTRACT African hereditary groups of occupational specialists are an object of study neglected by social sciences. They often disappear into the broad category of minority groups, and social and historical analyses miss the specific characteristics of their forms of marginalisation. This article adopts the perspective of the Gaboye of Somaliland as an example of the contribution that these groups

ABSTRACT Across Africa, One-Stop Border Posts are being rolled out as part of a continental/ regional integration agenda that seeks to facilitate the movement of people and goods. This article focuses on four OSBPs in East Africa and addresses the question, firstly, of how far they make a break with entrenched operational patterns within government bureaucracies, and secondly whether they represent

ABSTRACT In the past decade an increasing number of adolescent girls in Ethiopia have moved from villages and rural towns to Addis Ababa to improve their own lives and those of their families. While girls’ migration is in a way a ‘normality’, with historically girls migrating for domestic work, the dominant discourse in Ethiopia describes the migration of girls mainly in terms of trafficking and exploitation

ABSTRACT Participatory Budgeting (PB) experiments in municipalities across the world have yielded varied results as there are municipalities. The Kenyan experience of participatory experiments has not fared any better. Following the 2013 elections, which initiated county governments in line with the 2010 constitution, Makueni County emerged as a unique case for study having experimented with its very

ABSTRACT Collective organizing represents one way in which street and market vendors in urban sub-Saharan Africa advocate their interests and strive towards more inclusive urban policies. Several studies have shown both the opportunities vendors associations may have for vendors as well as their pitfalls. This paper contributes to this discussion by addressing how vendors have used the platforms of

ABSTRACT Since the triple crises of food, fuel and finance of 2007/8, investments in agricultural growth corridors have taken centre-stage in government, donor and private sector initiatives. This article examines the politics of the multi-billion dollar development of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT). The corridor’s proponents aim to create an environment in which agribusiness

ABSTRACT In the past decade, the Mozambican government has been mobilizing international capital to build and renovate transport infrastructure in the central and northern areas of the country, with the aim of creating agricultural corridors. Based on field research conducted in two districts along the Beira and Nacala corridors, I examine those occasions when international capital and national agricultural

ABSTRACT In much of Eastern Africa, the last decade has seen a renewed interest in spatial development plans that link mineral exploitation, transport infrastructure and agricultural commercialisation. While these development corridors have yielded complex results – even in cases where significant investments are yet to happen – much of the existing analysis continues to focus on economic and implementation

ABSTRACT To attract investments in mineral extraction, physical infrastructure and agricultural commercialization over a vast swathe of Northern Kenya, national politicians and bureaucrats are casting the area as being both abundant with land and resources, and as, conversely, ‘backward’, ‘unexploited’ and ‘empty’. Drawing on evidence from Lamu County, and focusing on the planned Lamu Port and South

ABSTRACT Drawing on fieldwork conducted over multiple seasons between 2012 and 2015, this paper explores aspects of the socio-economic and political history of the Marakwet of Kenya. It does so by focusing on a particular material culture category – pottery – and tracing transformations in its production, use and exchange over several generations from the early twentieth century to the present day

(2020). Correction. Journal of Eastern African Studies: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 689-689.

ABSTRACT Taxation represents a claim to statehood and plays a vital role in processes of mutual recognition between subjects and the state. Debates on the benefits of taxing the informal economy have stressed the mutual benefits of entering into such formalized contracts of recognition. However, based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh, Nairobi, I will show how fixed categories

ABSTRACT Over the past four decades, the small town of Naivasha in Kenya has attracted tens of thousands of labour migrants. These migrants are looking for employment on one of the many flower farms located on the shores of Lake Naivasha. This article examines how the migrants, who mostly do not settle in Naivasha permanently, carve out space for themselves in the residential areas where they rent

ABSTRACT Histories of decolonization in Africa tend to present a unidirectional process with the eventual independent states as the seemingly natural outcome, thus ignoring or distorting actions and actors with transnational or translocal agendas. In the case of Burundi, decolonization is presented either as national liberation or as a prelude to ethnic conflict within a national frame of reference

ABSTRACT The National Resistance Movement government in Uganda after three decades in power still appeals to the legacy of the liberation struggle to reaffirm and legitimize its control over the state. The Uganda People’s Defence Forces as the regime’s historical midwife play a critical role in these symbolic politics. Retaining institutions and practices of revolutionary politicization, the military

ABSTRACT Community policing has been a popular paradigm for local anti-crime activities in Africa since the 1990s and spread rapidly across the continent. Humanitarian agencies have increasingly embraced versions of the framework to administer refugee camps and ostensibly foster security, protection and peaceful co-existence among residents. This article demonstrates that the deployment of community

ABSTRACT Geothermal development in Kenya’s Rift Valley will reap enormous energy benefits for the nation as a whole. But its impacts upon local communities, in this case in the Ol Karia area of Nakuru County, are often negative, and geothermal expansion has led to many divisions and conflicts over equitable resource use, environmental degradation, health impacts on humans and animals, forced resettlement

ABSTRACT This paper uses the history of the religious/healing movement Kitawala in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a lens to explore the relationship between forms of state-sanctioned “customary” authority and alternative nodes of “authority that is customary.” Focusing on three different case studies from different eras of the colonial and post-colonial history of Kitawala, the article explores

ABSTRACT This article analyses the production and reproduction of traditional chieftaincy in war-torn eastern DR Congo, through the case of a succession dispute in Kalima (South Kivu). Kalima has gone through two decades of political instability and violent conflict involving a plethora of local, national and regional actors. During this period of uncertainty and upheaval, the institution of traditional

ABSTRACT Spiritual and divine authorities play a prominent role in mobilizing armed violence. This article provides a micro-history of a contemporary Nuer prophetess (guan kuoth) in South Sudan who mobilized hundreds of armed men including in support of current anti-government rebellions. The article grapples with apparent paradoxes in her approach to kume (a broadly defined notion of government) and

ABSTRACT Kanjogera looms large in Rwandan history as a Queen Mother (1895–1931) – a position equal to that of the king – who wielded extraordinary political power. While she was not the first Rwandan woman to exercise this kind of power, she is arguably the most widely remembered in Rwandan popular culture largely due to the brutalities she allegedly inflicted upon her perceived enemies. But why do

ABSTRACT This paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government’s aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era ‘traditional’ chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the complex relation between protracted donor interventions and the production of customary authority. More specifically, the paper analyses the impact of post-conflict donor interventions (and their withdrawal) on the position of customary chiefs in the Acholi region in northern Uganda. As important brokers between international aid agencies, the Ugandan government

ABSTRACT Renewed attention on customary authority in both scholarship and development interventions renders it pertinent to revisit how contemporary engagement with this form of authority is still informed by colonial legacies. These legacies include: first, the penchant to see customary authority as solely invested in ‘chiefs’, rather than being relational and multifaceted; second, compartmentalized

ABSTRACT By means of two case studies, this paper demonstrates how customary chiefs in Northeast Congo crafted their power position under colonial indirect rule. The first case discusses chiefs’ role in anioto or leopard-men killings to secure their authority over people, land and resources whilst circumventing colonial control. The second case concerns nebeli, a collective therapy characterised by

ABSTRACT Malawi has recently seen a rise in the number and prominence of formal ethnic associations. What is the nature of these organizations and what effect will they have on politics? To answer these questions, we conducted in-depth interviews with current and former leaders of the three main ethnic associations, Mulhako wa Alhomwe, Mzimba Heritage Association, and Chewa Heritage Foundation. The

ABSTRACT This article investigates the construction of citizens and subjects in eastern Ethiopia during the period of the British Military Administration from 1944 to 1954. It does so by examining processes of identity formation during this period. The article argues that when Britain administered parts of eastern Ethiopia during this period it entrenched customary authority, which became a focal point