Atieno Odhiambo's ‘Hegemonic Enterprises and Instrumentalities of Survival’ sums up Kenya's political history in the twentieth century as

Odhiambo identifies four historical themes in this political biography of Kenya: ‘state power and who should control that power’, ‘the tyranny of property pitting the haves and the have-nots’, ‘the politics of clan and tribe, pitting insiders against outsiders [translated] into the idiom and practice of ethnic cleansing’ and ‘the theatre of world citizenship, which links the individual and the state to an international discourse on democracy … human rights and international laws against all forms of discrimination’ (2002: 225). Each of these themes was to feature in Julie Ward's murder in some form, from state security institutions frustrating the family's search for answers, possibly in the interests of economically (and politically) well-placed individual(s), to the spectre of ‘ethnic’ militias training in the Mara Game Reserve and the framing of the case within an international discourse of human rights, as I discuss later in the book.

Interlaced in Atieno Odhiambo's compact history of Kenya and his four strands of the country's political biography is a recurrent motif of violence, whose bloody footprints – to use that patriotic trademark of the Kenyatta and Moi regimes – reaches back to the British colonial enterprise in Kenya, and forward to 2015, when Kenya's Vice President, William Samoei arap Ruto is facing charges relating to the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, which unfolded along largely ethnic lines that coincided with party loyalties; and saw over 2000 Kenyans lose their lives and thousands others displaced as alleged witnesses disappear or turn up dead under mysterious circumstances.