Infrastructure projects and rural politics in northern Kenya: the use of divergent expertise to negotiate the terms of land deals for transport infrastructure

In 2012, construction began on the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor in northern Kenya. Once complete, LAPSSET will connect Kenya, South Sudan and Ethiopia with a new transport infrastructure, including a highway, railway and pipeline. Authorities promise that LAPSSET will drive economic growth by improving trade and attracting investors while also stimulating development in rural areas surrounding transport routes. Despite this promise, many rural land users remain concerned about how LAPSSET stands to alter their access to and control over land. This contribution reflects on how these rural groups are attempting to negotiate proposed land-use changes for LAPSSET by creating and deploying expertise that challenges authorities’ claims about the costs and benefits of the corridor for rural landscapes and communities. The analysis shows that just as expertise can be constructed and circulated ‘from above’ to legitimise land deals for transport infrastructure, counter-claims can be produced and mobilised by rural land users to unsettle these land deals. This paper contributes to recent research that examines the specific strategies used by rural actors to influence proposed land-use changes, as well as research that considers how power inequalities shape and constrain the ability of different rural groups to negotiate the terms of land deals to their own advantage.     

肯尼亚的纳税人诉讼——公共资金支出权的司法审查

尽管肯尼亚设计了精巧的宪法机制控制公共支出,但肯尼亚公共资金管理不善的情形仍然大量存在.在肯尼亚政府公共资金支出的政治调控远远不够的情形下,法院接受纳税人诉讼以阻止公共资金的非法支出所引起的对公众的损害.纳税人诉讼是指任何已经为其不动产或动产缴纳了税收的人代表所有的纳税人所提起的诉讼.法院享有足够的裁量权去决定哪些案件里纳税人有诉讼资格,这使法院能够在对政府行为进行审查和保证政府正常运作之间保持平衡.纳税人诉讼将不仅大大有助于对公共支出的控制,而且也给予政府足够的财政空间实施其任务.     

Harnessing Africa's sun: China and the development of solar energy in Kenya

Africa has immense energy challenges, characterised by low rates of access to electricity, irregularities and a general shortage in electricity supply. Solar energy provides African governments with the opportunity to address these challenges. With an average quantity of five to six kilowatts of power from the sun per square metre per day, the continent has vast potential for producing energy from the sun. The moderate success that Kenya has achieved in its solar energy industry is commendable and provides a good platform for other countries aspiring to extend electrification to its population through solar energy. China's emerging capabilities in solar technology also offers the continent the opportunity to take decisive steps towards sustainable energy. The proposed partnership between China's Tianpu Xianxing Enterprise and Kenya's Electrogen Technologies to build a solar panel factory in Kenya is a positive step towards addressing energy challenges.     

Gender,Migration and Multiple Livelihoods: Cases from Eastern and Southern Africa

Focussing on Kenya, Lesotho and South Africa, this study examines the social impact in migrant-labour source areas of dramatically reduced employment prospects in urban areas. It considers the implications for rural livelihoods and the role which gender relations play in making possible, or impeding, people's ability to construct diversified livelihoods. When livelihoods change, gendered rights, responsibilities and power must be renegotiated. Husbands and wives may acknowledge interdependencies and negotiate, or they may disengage. Marriages may break down, or women become reluctant to marry at all, as the material basis of the household is undermined. These outcomes do not represent social breakdown, but residential instability is likely to become more common.     

Continuity despite change: Kenya's new constitution and executive power

What explains the continuation of strong executive power despite the introduction of new formal constraints on presidents? This article focuses on the elites working within the state agencies that execute presidential power, who benefit materially from their authority and have incentives to defy formal constraints placed on their own power. To evaluate this claim, I examine Kenya's 2010 constitution, which intended to reduce the power of Kenya's “imperial presidency” through formal constraints on the executive. As implementation has progressed, however, the executive bureaucracy – the Provincial Administration (PA) – has not changed in size, structure, or function, contrary to the explicit goals of the constitution's drafters. Using original interview and archival evidence, I find that the persistence of this agency – and by extension strong executive power – is due to PA administrators’ attempts to protect their material interests. This article shows that formal rule change may be insufficient to spur democratization in the face of entrenched authoritarian bureaucracies with strong incentives to maintain their pre-existing interests.     

Live-tweeting terror: a rhetorical analysis of @HSMPress_ Twitter updates during the 2013 Nairobi hostage crisis

With the advent of social media, terrorist organisations have seized an unprecedented opportunity to engage wider audiences with their ideologies and actions. This study aims to develop an understanding of this tactic by analysing its use in the 2013 Westgate Mall hostage crisis. During that event, the Twitter account @HSMPress_ provided continuous updates supporting the actions of the terrorist organisation Al-Shabaab. Situating the event within a framework of Jürgen Habermas’s theories of the Public Sphere and Andrew Mack’s theories of asymmetric warfare, this paper employs Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to perform a rhetorical analysis of the tweets using both artistic and inartistic factors. It does so in order to understand how they engaged the audience of the terrorist event, emphasising the performative nature of the text in accordance with behaviourist objectives. The results of this analysis will demonstrate how terrorist groups may use platforms like Twitter to achieve a strategic political goal by shifting viewer perspectives, with significant implications for future policy governing social media content and censorship.     

Digital dilemmas: the unintended consequences of election technology

Digital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections. This article argues that the growing use of these technologies has been driven by the fetishization of technology rather than by rigorous assessment of their effectiveness; that they may create significant opportunities for corruption that (among other things) vitiate their potential impact; and that they carry significant opportunity costs. Indeed, precisely because new technology tends to deflect attention away from more “traditional” strategies, the failure of digital checks and balances often renders an electoral process even more vulnerable to rigging than it was before. These observations are not intended as a manifesto against the digitization of elections; apart from anything else, we argue that the drivers of the adoption of these new methods are too powerful to resist. But the analysis draws attention to the importance of more careful assessments of the problems, as well as the benefits, of such technologies – and to the need for more careful planning in their deployment.     

Commitment issues: security and belonging in a white Kenyan household

Once the archetype of romantic colonialism, white Kenyans with personal or familial ties to colonialism face a multitude of challenges with respect to their history and political status. In this article, I examine how discourses related to whites “belonging” in Kenya have constellated around the issue of security, especially in Nairobi, where crime (and recently, terrorism) makes security a potent and political topic. Of particular importance is the staff that white Kenyans employ in their homes. In contexts where African neighbours are predominantly impoverished, I emphasise employer–employee relationships as a key performance of commitment to the Kenyan community. As amendments to the Kenyan constitution have brought forth new issues related to citizenship and “commitment” by white Kenyan citizens, I also proffer that domestic projects of securitisation help to establish their investment or commitment to Kenya, constituting both a grounded and discursive defence against crime or political antagonism.     

Going beyond data collection in ethnography: Options for bridging the gap between researchers and archivists

Abstract

This article investigates options for bridging the missing link between ethnographic field research and archiving. It interrogates the place of archiving in the entire fieldwork process and the roles played by researchers and archivists in promoting access. While a number of reasons explain the gap between research and archiving, the article identifies lack of collaboration as the main challenge. Borrowing from the postmodernist theoretical framework, the article argues that archivists cannot detach themselves from data collection, because the decisions they make are not objective but personal and subjective. The conclusion and main message are that digital technology, in spite of its many advantages, may not deliver all that it promises to data collection and archiving. There is a need to complement digital technology data collection and archiving with traditional archiving methods because of the latter's reliability and cost effectiveness.