Outsiders in their own nation: Electoral violence and politics of ‘internal’ displacement in Kenya

Introduction

Internal displacement remains a significant global human security challenge as millions of people are displaced each year. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are people who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes due to armed conflict, generalized violence, human rights violations, development projects, and natural or human-made disasters (Mooney, 2005; Phuong, 2004). Unlike refugees, IDPs do not cross an internationally recognized state border, they remain within the borders of their own country and are under the protection of their government. Recent figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC, 2016) indicate that about 40.8 million people globally had been displaced by conflict or violence at the end of 2015, making IDPs twice the number of refugees worldwide, and of whom the majority are in protracted displacement. In addition, disasters displaced about 19.2 million people in 2015. These figures suggest that a large number of people are vulnerable to human rights abuses and face threats to their survival, livelihoods, and dignity.

Yet, for the most part, migration scholarship and practice has focused on the notion of nation-states and transnational movement and, hence, the idea of crossing international boundaries which then define and structure migrants’ rights and human security (see Purkayastha’s introductory article, this issue). This framing is particularly visible in the literature and international humanitarian practices towards IDPs, and conditions the protection they receive vis-a-vis that of refugees. Refugees, defined as persons who cross national boundaries, have legal international protection while IDPs do not (Njiru and Purkayastha, 2015; Phuong, 2004). Drawing on ethnographic interviews with IDPs who fled the 2007–2008 post-election violence in Kenya, and humanitarian actors, I go beyond border-focused forced migration to foreground a continuum of local to global fault lines that shape conflict-induced displacement and position IDPs as foreigners within their own nation-state while raising questions about their human rights protection and human security. Specifically, I pay attention to the intersections of ethnicity, politics, land rights, and global humanitarian politics on displacement to analyze experiences of IDPs in Kenya and question the relevance of the bureaucratic distinction between IDPs and refugees. This article argues that, like refugees, IDPs are externally displaced if we consider ‘the realities of a fractured nationhood and its fault lines’ (Samaddar, 1999). That is, it examines the less visible within-state borders that IDPs cross, and which shape their experience of human security. In the following section, I briefly put electoral violence-related displacement in Kenya into context.

Contextualizing electoral violence and displacement in Kenya: The intersection of land, ethnicity, and politics

Inter-ethnic electoral violence emerged in the beginning of the transition to multi-party democracy in the early 1990s as presidential candidates galvanized support from their respective ethnic communities. Scholars in Kenya have linked the electoral violence to historical land injustices, economic inequalities, and colonial ethnicization of Kenya and its politics (Ajulu, 2002; Kamungi, 2009; Kanyinga, 2009; Okoth-Ogendo, 1981; Oloo, 2010). Land ownership, ethnicity, and politics are intertwined factors: political competition for access to state resources fuels ethnic hatred and politicization of land issues. The question of land, land rights, and the emerging politics of ethnicity around it is linked to processes that led to the establishment of the colonial settler economy.

This process involved restructuring existing mechanisms of control and access to land from customary to private land tenures, introduction of colonial laws such as the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 that facilitated land expropriation and alienation and bifurcated land into ‘native reserves’ (for Africans) and ‘scheduled land’ (white highlands) for European settlement. This took away all the land rights of the ‘Africans’ and vested those rights in the Crown (Kanyinga, 2009; Oduol and Kabira, 1995; Okoth-Ogendo, 1981). What is significant for the colonial ethnicization of Kenyan society was that each of the land units in the natives’ land was reserved for a particular ethnic group. In the end, colonial land control processes left many Kenyans, especially the Kikuyu who had inhabited the expropriated areas, landless (Kanyinga, 2009). How the problem of land rights was settled at independence contributed significantly to the shaping of ethnic dimensions of the land question.

The first president of independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, attempted to address land issues in the 1960s via settlement schemes and land purchase programs to settle the landless Kikuyu in the Rift Valley (and along the Kenya Coast). He also rewarded the Kikuyu with top state appointments including the police, the military, and intelligence (Kanyinga, 2009). The government’s land programs had been meant to ensure economic stability of the new administration by addressing the only possible source of political unrest, the Kikuyu landless in the Rift Valley, but this deepened ethnic animosity. The Kalenjin in the Rift Valley resented the programs because they tended to benefit the Kikuyu in an area that the Kalenjin considered their native land. Following Kenyatta’s death, President Moi, a Kalenjin, sought to redress the inequality suffered by his ethnic group by instituting measures that would undermine the dominance of Kikuyus in business and control of land. He also appointed Kalenjins to state security apparatus, therefore replacing those of former President Kenyatta’s Kikuyu ethnic group – though he retained some Kikuyu elite whose support he depended upon to keep power (Kanyinga, 2009).

During the clamor for multi-party democracy in the early 1990s, Moi and his supporters in the Kenya African National Union (KANU) Party argued that those in the political opposition demanding multi-party democracy, the Kikuyu in particular, had secured land in the Rift Valley meant for the Kalenjin, who had historical territorial claims to the area. From then on, political campaigns were built on discourses of ethnic ‘othering’ and the need to re-claim land from these ‘others’ who had benefited from Kenyatta’s post-colonial land reforms. This form of political exclusion sought to eliminate those opposed to Moi – the Kikuyu in particular – by evicting them from land they had occupied in the settlement schemes or bought through the land purchase program (Kanyinga, 2009). Multi-party politics saw the deepened ‘reconstruction of ethnicity, ethnic mobilization and ethnic conflict as the main instruments of political contestation’ (Ajulu, 2002: 251). Thus, by 1990, two decades of policies to advance ethnic and individual economic interest had produced a serious inequitable structure of access, and created a volatile ethnic situation in Kenya, particularly in the Rift Valley.

Politics in the country now consists of ethnic political parties and highly cohesive bloc-voting ethnic groups and coalitions of groups. Marginalization and inequalities in the distribution of power and resources have resulted in ethnic-based political parties rather than ideological commitment, in the hope that if they capture power, they will benefit from state resources. Global capitalist processes have entrenched socio-economic inequalities and the fight for patronage resources. Land becomes the symbol for organization of ethnic identities which are mobilized for political purposes, including conflict. Because of these discourses of domination and resource control, violence related to land and targeting the Kikuyu for eviction has followed election cycles from 1992, with the exception of the 2002 election ¹ (Kanyinga, 2009). The 2007–2008 post-election violence which is the focus of this article was more generalized than the previous electoral violence, and extended to many regions in Kenya causing massive displacement, injuries, and deaths. The epicenters of the displacement were the Rift Valley, Western, Coast, and Nairobi regions, which contain indigenous ethnic groups who consider migrants as outsiders and a threat to resources and livelihood opportunities.

Formation of ethnic political parties has often gone hand in hand with the formation of militant groups of especially marginalized youth who claim to safeguard the interests of their specific communities (Commission of Inquiry into the Post-Election Violence in Kenya [CIPEV], 2008; Oloo, 2010), bringing to the fore the role of politically motivated militia groups in the uneasy nexus of ethnicity, land, and politics. Politicians have financed and exploited marginalized and unemployed youth who are excluded from political decision-making processes by calling on ethnic identity to fan the flames of hatred and violence against ‘other’ individuals and communities, particularly during the electoral period (Oloo, 2010). Many gangs emerged with Moi’s reign in the multi-party era and were used to intimidate people to vote for his party, KANU. As opposition parties became increasingly vulnerable to state-sponsored militias, they resorted to creating their own militia groups for protection during election campaigns (CIPEV, 2008; Oloo, 2010). The gangs played a key role in the displacement, murder, and maiming of thousands of people in various parts of Kenya post the 2007 election.

Ethnic polarization and the resulting violence led to more than 1300 deaths, displacement of an estimated 663,921 persons while about 12,000 fled to neighboring countries as refugees (Kamungi, 2009). ² The displaced experienced physical, sexual, and psychological harm. The displacement was a time-bomb waiting to explode given these longstanding intertwined systemic factors that the state and the political class have failed to address. These factors continued to shape the lives of IDPs in the camps to which they fled after evictions from their homes, and threatened their human security.

Locating internal displacement within a migration and human security framework

Achieving human security is a question of realizing the full spectrum of human rights – social, economic, cultural, environmental, civil, and political (see Purkayastha, this issue). As I pointed out earlier, refugees are protected under an international convention while IDPs have no international legal framework for their protection even though, in practice, refugees continue to experience insecurities. This international legal practice informs us that the human rights and security of migrants are largely defined by the migration category to which they belong, ranging from ‘voluntary’ migrants to refugees who are forced to leave their countries to escape persecution (Grant, 2005). Conceptualized this way, then, migration and human security are intersecting issues, meaning that there are human security consequences for categorizing and attributing legal status to some groups of migrants and denying status to others such as the IDPs.

Internal displacement is seen as falling within the domain of internal sovereignty and national security and is not an international community’s primary responsibility. However, while not defined as refugees, IDPs have been dealt with by refugee structures such as the UNHCR, which provides some protection and assistance during the displacement period as part of humanitarian acts. Indeed, the expanding role of international organizations in protecting and assisting IDPs reflects changing notions of sovereignty and an emerging international responsibility toward IDPs. Internal displacement is linked with the refugee problem insofar as it often constitutes a preliminary step towards external (international border crossing) displacement (Phuong, 2004). Further, it is associated with the politics and desire of refugee-receiving states to contain refugees within the countries of origin. Thus, while asserting humanitarian motives, states may focus on in-country protection to prevent their asylum obligations from being activated. Phuong argues that the increase in the international concern for IDPs can be explained by two reasons of a very different nature: humanitarian, and the other more political and self-serving, to prevent IDPs from becoming refugees.

In response to the growing phenomenon of IDPs worldwide, the UN Secretary-General, at the request of the UN Commission on Human Rights, appointed Francis Deng as the Representative on IDPs in 1992. Deng steered the process of developing a normative framework specifically tailored to address and meet the rights and needs of IDPs: The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (GP) of 1998. The GP contain 30 principles drawn from international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international refugee law. These identify rights and guarantees relevant to protection from forced displacement, and protection and assistance during displacement and during the process of resettlement and reintegration (Kenya Human Rights Commission [KHRC], 2009). Yet, the GP are not legally binding in the way that the Refugee Convention is; there are no enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance. Even though some countries, such as Kenya, have incorporated protective aspects of the GP into their national legislation, the protection of IDPs is not absolute.

In the 2007–2008 conflicts, Kenya did not have a specific local legal framework for IDPs (even though displacement was not new). In its absence, Kenya relied on the GP and the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) Pact signed in 2006. But the government was heavily accused of failing to implement both the GP and the ICGLR by human rights organizations and scholars (Human Rights Watch, 2011; Kamungi and Klopp, 2008; KHRC, 2009). The fact that people may flee as a result of state human rights violations, including politically instigated violence as was the case in Kenya, questions the commitment of those same governments in protecting and safeguarding their rights and security. IDPs largely remain at the mercy of their governments under the assumption that other binding international and domestic legislation will be adequate for their protection. Yet, many countries that are experiencing conflicts have poor government infrastructure, and have often been accused of inadequate protection for their citizens (KHRC, 2009). This makes displaced persons more susceptible to continuing and additional layers of violence post the conflict period because there is neither strong commitment nor structured efforts to address their plight.

Therefore, the migration category and definition of IDPs highlights their extreme vulnerability the world over, and the practical and legal challenges of obtaining support from international actors, which then structures their ability to realize human security.

Data and methods

As part of a wider study on IDPs in Kenya from 2008 to 2014, this article draws on ethnographic interviews with 29 female and male IDPs living in different camps in the Rift Valley region, which experienced most of the electoral violence and displacement. I also interviewed 13 government staff and humanitarian actors involved in service provision in the camps. Discussions with IDPs focused on their backgrounds, fleeing violence, daily life experiences in camps including service provision, and resettlement process. With the government and humanitarian workers, I was interested in their response activities towards IDPs during and after the conflicts, views on human rights violations including gender violence, the resettlement process, and peace-building processes between ‘host’ ³ communities and IDPs. In addition to the field research, I have conducted an extensive analysis of texts relating to local and international policies and practices in internal displacement.

Outsiders and insiders during displacement

For several decades following its independence in 1963, Kenya stood as one of the most stable countries in an otherwise volatile region. But as I have noted earlier, the post-independence government policies to advance ethnic interests, coupled with global capitalist processes, produced an unequal structure of access to resources and laid fertile ground for ethnic politics and conflicts in the multi-party era. The conflicts reached a peak in the 2007 elections. The hotly contested, and disputed, presidential election was between the incumbent Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, who was seeking re-election for a second term of office, and the main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, from the Luo ethnic group. Both had formed strategic alliances with other large and small ethnic groups in a bid to win the election. For example, Kibaki was supported by the Kikuyu (who are also the largest ethnic group in Kenya) and allied groups, while Raila found support from his own Luo group, the Kalenjin in the Rift Valley, Luhya from the Western regions, and communities in the Coastal region.

Immediately following the declaration of Kibaki as the winner of the presidential election on Sunday, 30 December 2007, violence broke out in various parts of the country. Kibaki was sworn in within an hour after the declaration of the results, in a hurriedly prepared ceremony in State House in Nairobi, as violence erupted. In the two months that followed, and as Kibaki and Raila failed to agree on which of them exactly won the elections, political and social protests accompanied by violent attacks by youth gangs and equal violent reaction by government security forces, led to ‘ethnic cleansing’ particularly in the Rift Valley region. The majority of those evicted were Kikuyu, given their political history of settlement in the Rift Valley.

Participants in this research noted that tension had been building up during the election campaigns and as the vote counting went on. There were warning signs for the madoadoa (a derogatory term in Swahili meaning ‘spots or blemishes,’ – denoting ‘outsiders’ not belonging to the Rift Valley) to return to their indigenous lands should the vote count be in favor of Mwai Kibaki. Kamungi (2009) similarly observed that the resolve to recover Kalenjin ancestral land by evicting the madoadoa was well communicated at political rallies, through informal conversations with the ‘foreigners,’ mobile phone messages, email listservs, local radio stations, and internet blogs.

Many participants narrated how when violence broke out, foreign ethnic groups began to flee or were forcefully evicted from their homes by their hosts with whom they had coexisted for decades. They fled to public places such as nearby police stations, chiefs’ camps, schools, and churches. In some cases, violent gangs pursued and attacked them in these places before the government organized to transport them to camps away from the hostile communities. For instance, I visited the site of a church where over 30 women, men, and children were burnt alive by an angry mob who locked up the fleeing persons in the church, placed mattresses around the outside of the building, doused them in paraffin and set it on fire. Other fleeing persons were able to escape to their ancestral regions where they found shelter and other forms of support through families and other social networks.

Constructed as madoadoa, individuals experienced various forms of violence including sexual, physical, psychological, and loss of property and livelihoods. The violent acts were gendered as they involved forced circumcision of men, sodomy, and penile amputations, and the rape, gang rape, and defilement of women and girls (CIPEV, 2008; Human Rights Watch, 2016). The CIPEV and many human rights organizations reported widespread gang rape of women during the displacement period. I interviewed many women who now lived with the scars and painful memories of a political battle waged on their bodies through acts of sexual violence and whose lives had been made even more unbearable by camp conditions that lacked or provided minimum basic services. Wakina who lived in Eldoret, Rift Valley, prior to the conflicts, narrated her experience:

On January 1, 2008, my husband and I were in the house in the evening. Our two children were visiting their grandparents in Central province [ancestral land]. Suddenly, more than 10 young men armed with spears and machetes stormed into our house. I did not recognize them as they had smeared mud all over their faces. They told us they had come to kill us and they cut my husband up until he bled to death as I watched. Then they turned to me and asked what I wanted, I begged them not to kill me but one of them said that if I didn’t die from spear wounds then I would die of AIDS. They began to rape to me, I got unconscious when the second man was raping me so I don’t know how many did it. I woke up in hospital and learnt that a family friend and neighbor had come to our house when he heard what had happened and took me to hospital and my husband to the mortuary. After some days in hospital, I was brought to this camp.

For Wakina and other women who experienced sexual violence because they were labeled outsiders, rape represents the unequal power relationships between men and women in a patriarchal structure of society that enables men to use and abuse their power. More importantly, as I have noted in my earlier work (Njiru, 2014), during conflicts, rape becomes an important strategy of asset stripping by displacing populations from contested lands. Thus, sexual violence illuminates the linkages of ethnicity and gender as structures of power and collective identity that allowed for such violence to occur.

Yet, ethnic identity – insider/outsider categories – rarely plays any role in ordinary everyday interactions between hosts and migrants. Indeed, there are many inter-ethnic marriages between the two. However, during the conflict period, these marriages were considered ‘blemished’ and were violently attacked. For example, Human Rights Watch (2016: 31) reports a 53-year-old woman who was raped by two men after they threatened her with death and accused her of ‘having been sleeping with the enemy [husband] for too long.’ It is only during specific periods that the need to mobilize ethnic bonds arises. In this case, during competition for state power and perceived patronage resources. Kamungi (2009) has also rightly observed that the dichotomy is only tempered by political positioning of groups. When both migrants and hosts share a common political affiliation, the land question recedes and violence and displacement are less likely. Thus, displacement is a political strategy to disenfranchise ‘hostile’ voters rather than evict ‘outsider’ landowners.

In the context of historical land marginalization, nepotism, uneven development among different regions (ethnic blocs), and capitalist penetration which entrenches these inequalities and insecurities, it is almost inevitable that political power will be expressed in terms of ethnicity rather than social class. The fluidity of the insider/outsider categories draws us to also think about how ethnicities simultaneously merge and fracture (Purkayastha, 2005) and how the political class wields the instruments of power for both ethnic divisions and unity. The ethnic divide highlights the carefully constructed invisible boundaries between migrants and hosts with consequences for unequal access to citizenship rights and opportunities for secure lives. In the following section, I discuss the assistance and protection of IDPs in camps, and the resettlement politics that further entrenched the insider/outsider categories.

Humanitarianism, government resettlement, and politics of IDP protection

As ‘outsiders’ fled their homes to camps, a multitude of humanitarian actors and individuals immediately came forward to provide assistance and protection. After initial unstructured responses – Kenya was not prepared for this magnitude of violence – the government and humanitarian agencies drafted an institutional framework for coordination. The Kenya Red Cross Society became the lead agency in charge of relief operations on behalf of the government, especially focusing on management and coordination of camps. UN agencies, on the other hand, employed a cluster approach for coordination and effective response; for example, the protection cluster was led by the UNHCR (Njiru and Purkayastha, 2015). Despite this, I found tensions between and among humanitarian organizations and government. For example, some NGOs did not want to be associated with the UN, feeling that they would lose their independence. There was also dissatisfaction among NGO actors due to parallel responses by government indicating lack of commitment to the response process (see Njiru and Purkayastha, 2015). The disjunctured and fragmented practices hampered efforts to adequately meet the welfare and dignity of IDPs and added layers of violence and vulnerability to IDPs’ situation.

At the same time, as violence escalated and Kenya was being torn apart, the African Union (AU) sought to mediate between the two warring leaders, Kibaki and Raila. Under the auspices of the AU Panel of Eminent African Personalities chaired by Kofi Annan, their political parties signed a power-sharing agreement on 28 February 2008, the National Accord and Reconciliation Act, which established the office of the Prime Minister and created a coalition government. The leaders also committed to a Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation (KNDR) process signed on 4 March 2008, to resolve the crisis and address long-term solutions to election violence. The KNDR ⁴ had four main agendas; (1) immediate action to stop the violence and restore fundamental rights and liberties; (2) address the humanitarian crisis, promote reconciliation, healing, and restoration of calm; (3) overcome political crisis; and (4) address long-term issues and the root cause of the conflict, including constitutional, legal, and institutional reforms (Wanyeki, 2008). Agenda 2 formed the basis for the resettlement of the IDPs and their humanitarian assistance.

The government committed to ensure quick and fair resettlement or return of the IDPs and launched the ‘Operation Rudi Nyumbani’ (ORN – Operation Return Home) program on 5 May 2008 to conclude by the end of that May. They offered 25,000 Kenyan shillings ($250) to the IDPs whose houses were burned or destroyed and 10,000 Kenyan shillings ($100) to those whose homes were looted. The program promised to increase physical security, rehabilitate or rebuild essential services, provide assistance for the first three months of return, and engage in peace and reconciliation initiatives between IDPs and hosts.

Some IDPs went home voluntarily but the majority remained in the camps demanding better resettlement packages and expressing fear to return to their farms in the absence of meaningful reconciliation with those who displaced them. In response, the government applied pressure, threats, and false promises of financial assistance once returnees reached their farms in order to force people to leave so they could close the camps. They cut off essential services such as water, education and healthcare, scaled down or completely discontinued food distribution, and withdrew security from the camps.

The government also forced humanitarian agencies to close their camp management structures and barred them from providing any services, leaving thousands of IDPs without any assistance or protection (Njiru and Purkayastha, 2015). To further enforce the deadline, the government forcefully transported IDPs out of the camps using military trucks. For instance, during the 2008 data collection exercise, I and the research team found the General Service Unit (GSU), a paramilitary wing of the Kenya military and Kenyan police, evicting IDPs from one of the camps and we were, therefore, not able to interview them. They put them in military trucks and drove them off to their pre-displacement homes. While many humanitarian actors had already left the camps after the fighting stopped due to cuts in donor funding, leaving thousands of people in dire need of assistance and protection, those who had remained had to comply with the government directive to leave the camps in order to facilitate the resettlement process.

As the government forcefully evicted IDPs from camps, humanitarian agencies, particularly the lead agencies in response, the UNHCR and the Kenya Red Cross, largely remained silent. In fact, they closed their offices in the camps in line with government directives in order to facilitate camp closure. But this conspiracy of silence was informed by the international legal practice surrounding internal displacement. Because no border crossing was involved, and IDPs have no legal status, internal displacement is seen as an internal security matter and the responsibility of the sovereign state; therefore it remains outside any legal intervention of international humanitarian agencies or community.

Generally, there was criticism of the government’s ad hoc application and violation of the Guiding Principles and failure to apply the Great Lakes Protocol. ⁵ Left to their own devices, the government deployed all violent means to close camps in order to show the world that peace had prevailed and that they were implementing a durable solution (local resettlement) as contained in the GP. Yet, government practices contravened the very essence of the durable solutions: to help displaced persons become self-sufficient, independent from aid, and to enable them to participate fully in social and economic life. The reality was that many IDPs continued to suffer yet they were less visible now because many humanitarian actors remained silent to avoid contradicting the government’s decision on camp closures.

The outcome of this political resettlement process was that majority of the IDPs could not return to their pre-displacement homes because they found that the host communities were still hostile and did not allow them back to their homes and land. In fact, Kanyinga (2009) has pointed out that some IDPs found that their host communities had changed names of the areas where the IDPs lived before displacement, implying that they did not want them back at all. They still viewed them as outsiders despite some peace and reconciliation meetings that were happening simultaneously with the resettlement process in accordance with Agenda 2. Consequently, IDPs set up other camps (known as transition or satellite camps) closer to their former homes. This way, they would attempt to access their farms in the day and return to the transit camps in the evening. Still, there were reports of daytime attacks in the farms. For example, in one of the satellite camps, we were informed that a male IDP had been attacked and wounded with a spear as he worked on his farm. Kamungi (2009) also observes that UNICEF reported allegations of deliberate poisoning of water sources and ethnic segregation of schools and markets in the return areas. In all these areas, public and civil servants who had fled the violence were unable to resume duty and this hampered essential service delivery. Therefore, it became difficult for some returnees to access these services. Here, government violated the very basic guiding principle borrowed from refugee law, that of non-refoulment, which provides protection against forced return to a situation where people would be at risk of violence or any other form of discrimination.

Another type of camp that emerged during the ORN as a result of fear to return to pre-displacement homes was the self-help camps. When government gave money for resettlement, some IDPs totally feared going back to their pre-displacement homes. These individuals pooled this money and officially registered self-help groups with the Department of Social Services, which enabled them to collectively purchase pieces of land that they would not have been able to purchase individually. They moved with their tents to these pieces of land. Other IDPs moved to land donated by well-wishers. In both cases, the land was in remote, non-arable, and underserviced areas. Because the government had greatly cut off support, the IDPs had to once more rely on humanitarian organizations and charitable individuals for survival when they moved to these camps.

What is interesting about the self-help camps is that these IDPs bought pieces of land in communities of their ethnic group expecting solidarity but, instead, found that they were still treated as outsiders. Thus, as with those who had returned to their pre-displacement homes, they experienced another layer of vulnerability and stigma. Their hosts saw them as competitors for the already scarce community goods and services. Research participants noted that jobs in the community were inconsistent and were marked by discriminatory and exploitative practices against the IDPs by the new hosts. For example, IDPs would be paid less than other community members. My earlier work (Njiru and Purkayastha, 2015) also highlighted discriminatory practices in schools, hospitals, and other essential service sectors. For example, gender and children’s officers reported cases of child abuse and exploitation of IDPs in camps. There were also individuals who employed female IDPs as domestic workers and would abuse them.

That discord and exclusionary practices occurred among members of the same ethnic bloc during a period when ethnic identification and solidarity were expected highlights certain human insecurities. Forced migration affects host populations by increasing pressure on services and creating changes to hosts’ social lives. Also, because the label IDP is associated with humanitarian assistance, the exclusion of hosts from this label may consolidate differences between those included and those excluded from the label. Thus, IDPs are not insiders to communities of their ethnic group as long as they are seen as either a threat to scarce resources and opportunities or to exclude hosts from benefits accrued to IDPs by virtue of their label. These identity formations may become ground for discrimination and hostility thus making it harder for IDPs to build secure lives after their displacement.

Consequently, the government resettlement program did not really end displacement: IDPs found that their homes were occupied or they did not fully integrate in other settlement locations. Thus, even though the situation (electoral violence) causing displacement no longer existed, without access to means of survival and hopes of building secure lives, displacement extended over a long period of time post camp closures. Indeed, the weaknesses in the structure of resettlement mainly served to uproot the humanitarian crisis from the original camps and plant it in the various camps that mushroomed after the ORN. Except, there was no humanitarian intervention, as such, in these other camps.

The government was more concerned with fulfilling Agenda 2 than ensuring a dignified return and settlement of IDPs in their pre-displacement homes or new locations. I argue that the government’s action to officially close camps, without adequate political inclusiveness of IDPs, aimed at making an international claim and to portray an image of a national identity and secure territorial boundaries. In the following section, I discuss the issue of borders and fault lines that shape the human security of Kenya’s IDPs.

Borders, fault lines, and human security of IDPs

In the discussion above, I have highlighted how state and humanitarian practices emphasize territorial borders in the protection of IDPs. Unlike refugees who acquire legal status because they have crossed state borders, there is no international legal regime for the protection of IDPs. Indeed, the fundamental difference between protection of refugees and protection of IDPs is the responsibility of the government. Once refugees cross international borders, their country of origin is not obligated to protect them. IDPs, on the other hand, remain in their country of origin, whose government holds the responsibility to protect them regardless of its ability to do so. Without the benefit of a specialized legal regime, IDPs fall into a protection gap. Moreover, the international assistance for IDPs is ad hoc because agencies pick what assistance to offer on the basis of their mandates, resources, and other political considerations. As a result of this legal and practice gap, many IDPs are without adequate assistance and without the protection they need (Mooney, 2005). This emphasis on international borders adds layers of vulnerability and insecurity to the IDPs’ condition.

Within forced migration scholarship, there is a growing and real concern over the problematic preoccupation with international borders. For example, Samaddar (1999) has argued that the approach of privileging the national border ignores other institutions that account for migration, that is, the realities of a fractured nationhood and its fault lines. Further, Samir Kumar Das (2008) observes that IDPs are displaced internally only when we view them from within the territorially defined borders of the nation-state. However, viewed from within the borders of imaginary homelands – that are as sharply defined and meticulously maintained as territorial borders of the nation-state – it does not matter whether those who get displaced are IDPs or refugees. They will be thrown outside the homeland that is not their own. Although IDPs do not cross clearly visible and relatively stable international borders, they cross less visible and more fluid lines of division within the same state. Thus, the focus on international border crossing obscures the ability to examine other within-state external borders that place IDPs at the extreme end along the continuum of those who can access rights and those with the least chance of having secure lives.

IDPs in Kenya represent the socio-political fault lines of the country, global inequality, and the fault lines in the global and regional IDP policies and practice. Kenya’s national identity might be expressed in the concept of a fractured nationhood (Samaddar, 1999). The ethnicization of Kenya and of its politics by the British colonial government and the post-independence political class, and the politicization of land, have continued to divide Kenya along ethnic lines as it played out in the post-2007 election violence. Therefore, failure of post-independence governments to transcend ethnic identity politics and to address Kenya’s social, economic, and political structural conditions shapes IDPs’ vulnerabilities to violence, their experiences as foreigners in their own homelands, and their ability to move beyond violence-prone lives and to realize human security.

These fault lines overlap and interact with the fault lines of global inequality; the deepening process of globalization, neoliberalism, and western imperialism. Particularly, the macro-economic structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) adopted by Kenya in the 1980s paved the way for a neoliberal era, the free market (Nduta Gichuri, 2006). This era has produced devastating consequences for the economic, social, and political lives of many Kenyans and has greatly entrenched ethnic identities as groups compete for power and scarce resources. These invisible boundaries shape electoral politics, electoral violence, and displacement and outsider-insider categorization and experiences. Viewed this way, then, internal displacement is shaped by the glocal and overlapping factors of international borders, the faultiness of international humanitarian policies and practices, global inequality, and other internal socio-political fault lines of Kenya. These factors shape how displaced persons access rights and how their fundamental freedoms are protected in order to achieve lives that are socially, politically, culturally, economically, and environmentally secure and dignified.

Conclusion

This article has examined the socio-political historical and contemporary factors that led to the violence and displacement in the Rift Valley region of Kenya following the 2007 presidential election. I have discussed how politicized ethnicity and land rights led to displacement and positioning of ethnic minorities ‘as outsiders in their own nation.’ I have further analyzed the government’s IDP resettlement process and the politics of humanitarianism to point out disjunctured assistance, and the privileging of national borders in the protection of IDPs. My analysis questioned the preoccupation with physical borders which bifurcates IDPs and refugees and grants them differential protection. The plight of IDPs is parallel to that of refugees, but for the existence of national physical boundaries. In fact, IDPs are externally displaced if we go beyond the physical national borders to consider the internal nation-hood fractures – and global fault lines – that construct insider/outsider categories, so that people are displaced outside their homelands, like refugees. Such a view of IDPs would avoid the artificial line drawn between refugees (who are protected) and IDPs (who are not), so as to extend international protection and provision of citizenship rights to all who are forced to flee from their homes and communities regardless of whether they have crossed national boundaries. By emphasizing nation-states and national border crossing, we lose sight of other intersecting fault lines or borders that structure migration and human security. Therefore, international humanitarian agencies and nation-states have to engage more with IDPs and bureaucratic distinctions in a world where everyday insecurities are causing displacement. Further, Kenya needs to address the historical internal fault lines that continue to affect the post-colonial state and pose a dilemma in constructing a national identity.