The international aid community presents education and employment programs as the keys to mitigating youth participation in violence. Yet, existing evidence suggests that faith in such programs may be misplaced. This study investigates this disconnect between faith and evidence. It argues that education and employment programs are commonly built on an economically-focused “dominant discourse” that makes presumptions about youth and their interests. Based on qualitative research with youth in Nairobi, Kenya, it further argues that this dominant discourse overlooks self-identity and social connectedness factors that are crucial to youth, as well as the limitations imposed by governance and structural conditions.

This article examines differing explanations for violence against foreign nationals in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the most compelling analyses in the scholarship draw from a family of arguments in the global literature that locates popular violence against outsiders within the context of declining sovereign power, explaining theatrical displays of force against enemies within as attempts at the retrieval of that power. To the extent that these arguments rely on the concept of a scapegoat, they are inadequate. More analytical attention needs to be paid to the scene of the encounters between the “us” and the “them” of collective violence.

Despite gains in national income, Ethiopia’s cities have seen a steady increase of homeless women and children. This study focuses on the lives of twenty-five adult women and twenty-seven children living on the streets of Hawassa, Ethiopia. Nearly all were driven to the streets by poverty compounded by abuse and violence and/or loss of supporting family members, illness, and lack of social supports. The Ethiopian government offers a food-for-work program, but this is an inadequate social safety net. Recommendations include government provision of long-term shelter, food assistance, school supplies for children, legal and economic assistance, and access to medical care.

From the outside, northern Chad has long been seen as an area of lawlessness, defined primarily by its inhabitants’ alleged propensity for raiding and thieving. From the inside, northern Chad indeed appears as an area that thrives on a rhetoric of predation. This, however, is perhaps best understood not in terms of “crime,” but rather as a striving for personal autonomy, as a public denial of reciprocity in a context where notions of bounded moral community and indeed of long-term social strategies of exchange are not much in evidence.

This article explores the impact of gender quotas on sustainable representation in Africa. Sustainable representation is broadly defined as viable and substantial political representation secured for the long run. The research draws on evidence from cross-national election data and two case studies, Uganda and Kenya, which demonstrate that women rarely exceed the minimum thresholds set by gender quotas. This suggests that these quotas may have a ceiling effect on women’s representation. For gender quotas to generate long-term representational outcomes, they must be designed to account for other characteristics of the electoral context that affect women’s participation outside the quota mandate.

This article explores the characteristics of Nairobi underground hip hop that fit under a common theme of what I term as the music’s “political seriousness,” which is the common notion that the music must be substantive, thought-provoking, socially critical, and never vacuous. This political seriousness is composed of four characteristics: Mau Mau gendered legacies, political love, a reliance on neoliberalism, and a critique of the state. Hip hop’s goal is to make a political space that both proves its worth and remedies Kenya’s flawed polity. This is an imperfect endeavor, as its dependence on late capitalism, normative gender constructions, and conventional understandings of the Mau Mau war contribute to rap’s troubling tendencies. Nonetheless, these artists regard hip hop as authentic or real music because it advocates for the economically disenfranchised, contributes to Kenyan social commentary, and participates in an imagined global hip hop culture.

This article explores the role of tourism in the development plans of Kenya during the 1960s and 1970s, examining what this reveals about the new opportunities and constrictions that officials encountered as they tried to globally reconfigure the place of their new decolonizing nation in the post-colonial world. These themes are explored by examining the political economy of development and tourism, the marketing infrastructures that Kenyan officials created to shape how Western consumers thought about “Kenya,” and how these factors influenced the kinds of discourses that were promoted globally about this newly-independent African country.

The technocrat, a supposedly apolitical figure who joins government on the basis of technical expertise, looms large in discussions of governance. The empowerment of technocrats has sometimes been taken as a barometer for Africa’s economic and democratic progress. Rejecting this conventional wisdom, this article argues that technocrats are inevitably trapped in a web of politics—politicians leverage the apolitical image of technocrats for political gain, and public debates implicate technocrats as targets of protest. This article pursues this argument through a case study of Nigeria, where technocrats were both politicized and politicizing figures during the rule of the People’s Democratic Party between 1999 and 2015.

This article examines the historical as well as contemporary significance of South Africa’s 1913 ban on the recruitment of migrant workers from areas north of latitude 22 degrees south. This ill-conceived policy not only criminalized the employment of so-called “tropical natives” in South Africa but also triggered contestations, fueling illegal migration from the restricted areas. By 1933, when the ban was lifted, illegal migration from Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) had become a major site of contestations among policymakers, labor agents, business owners, and migrant workers in South Africa. While the dominant narrative in Southern Africa holds that illegal migration only became an issue of concern after the end of apartheid rule, this phenomenon has a much longer history in the subregion. Identifying factors that push people to move from one country to another and those that force or encourage travelers to cross international boundaries without following official channels facilitates the understanding of the complexities involved in cases of illegal migration wherever this practice exists. While low wages and other sources of insecurity in colonial Zimbabwe may indeed have compelled many people to consider moving to South Africa, such factors did not cause migrants to use unofficial channels in crossing the border. Rather, South Africa’s ban imposed numerous barriers, rendering it difficult for those seeking work to cross between the two countries through legal and/or formal channels.

This article, based on fieldwork in Western Kenya from 2012 to 2016, describes how life cycle rituals collect and distribute different forms of money, including land, property, personhood, animals, cash, and digital moneys. It specifically examines a ritual coming of age for adolescent boys. By organizing multiple forms of money relative to the phases of a human life, the past, and the future, these rituals serve to manage and transfer wealth across generations and to give these transfers social and moral dimensions. The study provokes a critique of financial initiatives in the Global South that often assume that the financial goals of the poor are short-term.

This article explores the intersections of violence, morality, and place to theorize the notion of moral violence. Using narratives collected during ethnographic research in a highway town in Kenya, it suggests that when people offer moralizing sentiments about this locality they are pointing to (and sometimes reproducing) the effects of and anxieties about the decades of violence and inequalities that have engulfed the lives of the residents. Particular attention is paid to the way in which narratives about political/ethnic violence and HIV/AIDS have blended to create and sustain moral violence as a chronic and particular, historically embedded variant of structural violence.

This article situates the shooting of white Kenyan landowner Kuki Gallmann within recent critiques of community-based conservation and the politics of whiteness in Kenya. I discuss how conservation has enabled white landowners to consolidate their influence over Laikipia County, as well as neighboring regions of Kenya via an organization called the Northern Rangelands Trust. The NRT is feared to be undermining regional livestock economies, while contributing to land shortages that have precipitated violence in Laikipia. I argue that the pastoralists implicated in these conflicts are subject to a maelstrom of livelihood stressors, some of which are aggravated by the efforts of white Kenyans to expand conservation throughout northern Kenya.