Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation

Abstract

This paper serves as an introduction to the Special Collection on "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 role that the Kenyan state has played in the construction and subsequent politicization of Kenyan youth in a variety of ways across time and space. In elaborating this main contention, this introduction frames the six papers in the Special Collection within a threepronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similiar 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 both 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. In taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers on offer here are able to provide a more nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.

A self-fulfilling prophecy? Constructions of youth-as-troublemakers in UN DDR processes

“…Bersaglio et al (2015) explain that the concept of youth, like all identities, is perhaps better understood as a social construct, an approach that allows for a denaturalization and the historicization of the term. While institutional definitions tend to approach youth as an all-encompassing category where differences related to, for example, gender, race, class, disability, ethnicity and geography are considered secondary and subsumed under a common identification of youthhood (Specht, 2008), understanding youth as a social construct sheds light on the pertinence of abovementioned intersectional considerations (Kimari et al, 2020: 694). Literature on youth politics in Africa, drawing on anthropological notions of liminality and rites of passage, have in particular made significant strides in approaching youth in transformative and relational terms (Durham, 2004).…”

“…That said, the emergence of youth-as-troublemakers as a powerful concept by 2006, as opposed to the primary emphasis on the victim construction in 1999/2000, can be explained by considering the geopolitical developments that had transpired since the early 2000s. The crystallization of youth as a separate category, itself a reflection of the growing focus on youth by the international policymaking community, is crucially tied to a global political project of securitization and new expressions of militarism, triggered by the 9/11 attacks (Abrahamsen, 2018; Kimari et al, 2020).…”

Everyday Violence and Crosscutting Conditions Shaping Social and Political Dimensions of Unsafety in Youth Activism

“…Compared with offline violence tactics, online violent tactics are used routinely in daily practices. Similarly, new forms of state repression criminalize young adults’ political action before it occurs through expanded securitization and crime prevention (Calvo & Portos, 2019), and stigmatize youth activists and their groups with labels such as ‘radical extremist’ or ‘violent affirming extremism’ (Gordon & Taft, 2011; Jämte & Ellefsen, 2020; Kimari et al, 2020). Bystanders in the general population use hate speech and threats to act directly against activists of opposing viewpoints in everyday life, as Sager and Mulinari (2018) found in the experiences of self-identifying Muslim, Afro-Swedish and/or racialized feminist activists.…”

Youth Inclusion Projects and Violence Reduction: Perceptions from the NYS Cohorts Programme in Mathare and Kibera

“…These are rooted in unequal social, cultural, economic and political structures that put young people at risk of committing or being affected by violence. At the same time, Sommers (2011) has rightfully noted that many countries with youth bulges have not experienced civil war or violence, and, hence, there is a critical need to interrogate whether there is actually a direct link between youth unemployment and demography as drivers of violence (Kimari et al, 2020).…”