#SomeoneTellCNN: Cosmopolitan militarism in the East African warscape

Abstract

In October 2011, the Kenyan military invaded southern Somalia with the stated purpose of addressing the threat posed by the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab. This article illustrates how the Kenyan state invokes the ongoing fight against Al-Shabaab to perform what Merje Kuus refers to as “cosmopolitan militarism,” shifting attention away from the material dimensions of war and geopolitics to more abstract, imaginative domains. Cosmopolitan militarism functions here as a form of nation branding, marking Kenya as exceptional for its commitment to liberal norms of peace and security. At the same time, I draw upon state-produced documents, advertisements, and public speeches and events to analyze how cultural production shapes subjectivities, cultivating new imaginative geographies, militarized masculinities, and religiously inflected attachments to war.

Keywords

cultural production East Africa gender militarism nation branding race religion

In July 2015, Kenyans anxiously awaited the arrival of US President Barack Obama in the capital city of Nairobi. For weeks, national news outlets delivered intricate details about the logistics and security precautions related to Obama’s trip, from the US$1.5 million bombproof limousine he would move around in, to the fact that it would hold a supply of his blood in the trunk. The main roads in Nairobi would be closed and phone networks would likely be shut down, but this did not temper national intrigue about the upcoming visit from the most powerful man in the world—a Kenyan, in the eyes of many. The mood remained jovial until just before Air Force One touched down in Nairobi, when CNN referred to Kenya as “a hotbed of terror.” In doing so, the network referenced recent attacks in Kenya that had been attributed to the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab.

Kenyans on Twitter were up in arms. “Unless you are the one bringing the terror, we are a hotbed of investment opportunities and great people,” read one response. “#SomeoneTellCNN that we’re the 3^rd fastest growing economy in the world—terrorism doesn’t define our future,” proclaimed another. BBC Africa reported that there were 120,000 tweets with the hashtag #SomeoneTellCNN in under 24 hours. As the tweets implied, Kenya’s image had been tarnished by one of the world’s leading news organizations. Interior Secretary General Nkaissery characterized the headline as irresponsible and arrogant. “If they are civilized enough,” he declared, “they should apologize.”¹

Within 24 hours, CNN indicated in an online story that “The headline and lead of this article has been recast to indicate the terror threat is a regional one.”² A few weeks later, the company’s managing director flew from Atlanta to Nairobi to offer a personal apology, stating that “It was not a deliberate attempt to portray Kenya negatively. It is regrettable and we should not have done it. There is a world at war with extremists; we know what a hotbed of terror looks like and Kenya is not one.”³

In light of the mainstream media’s tendency to reinforce simplistic portrayals of the African continent, it is tempting to celebrate Kenyan reactions to the CNN headline as an example of what Kenyan writer Nanjala Nyabola (2017) characterizes as an “African-driven counter-narrative,” in which “the powerless speak up … and the powerful are forced to react.”⁴ However, I am reluctant to characterize the social media uproar in this way—first, because it is premised not on a rejection of a racialized geographic imaginary of Africa, but on the claim that this frame does not apply to Kenya. Second, it is important to recognize the ways in which this outcry was entangled in state-led branding efforts: as some have already observed, the hashtag most widely used alongside #SomeoneTellCNN was #MagicalKenya, the official tagline of Kenya’s Tourism Board (Nothias and Cheruiyot, 2019). More significantly, however, CNN’s readiness to “correct” its coverage was tied to the fact that the Kenyan government was a client of the network.⁵ In the wake of the controversy, the Kenya Tourism Board announced that it would cancel its US$1 million marketing deal with CNN for what it called “misrepresentation of the country’s security status.”⁶ The response from the network, therefore, reflected a financial calculation rather than a political one. Apology in hand, Kenya’s Tourism Secretary quickly reinstated the contract.

Meanwhile, high-level Kenyan officials capitalized on the media frenzy to shape public perceptions of the ongoing war against Al-Shabaab. President Uhuru Kenyatta proclaimed that CNN’s misrepresentation “made a mockery of the efforts and sacrifices made by Kenyan troops” fighting Al-Shabaab in Somalia. “Kenya is nothing like the countries that have real war,” he declared, “There was no reason to portray Kenya in that way.”

Is Kenya at war? In October 2011, following a spate of kidnappings of tourists and aid workers attributed to Al-Shabaab, the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) invaded southern Somalia. This was the first time in the nation’s history that its military had invaded another state.⁷ In launching Operation Linda Nchi (“Operation Defend the Country”), the government cited Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.⁸ “Our territorial integrity is threatened,” announced Internal Security Secretary George Saitoti. “It means we are now going to pursue the enemy, who are the Al-Shabaab, to wherever they will be.” And yet, there was no official declaration of war, which would have required authorization from Parliament. Instead, state officials have employed carefully constructed discourses and performances to construct the idea of a monolithic enemy, and to produce a spatial binary in the Kenyan public imagination about where “war” is unfolding. Since the invasion, however, spaces inside Kenya have become the target of a series of attacks by Al-Shabaab—from the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack of 2013 to the Garissa University attack of 2015, and most recently the Dusit hotel attack of January 2019. These events have constituted formative moments for the Kenyan public as they attempt to make sense of escalating violence and militarism in the region.

IMAGE: President Kenyatta in uniform in the corridors of State House, Nairobi, 2014.

This article explores the cultural and political labor that has been mobilized to shape understandings of Kenya’s role in the War on Terror.⁹ Specifically, it examines how the Kenyan state has used the threat of the Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabaab to normalize militarization at home and abroad through liberal narratives of global cooperation and responsibility. My focus is on how power works through spectacle and how relations of force are intertwined with relations of representation (Denning, 2004; Gramsci, 1971; Hall, 1996). Through state-produced documents, advertisements, and public speeches and events, I analyze how cultural production shifts attention away from the material dimensions of war and geopolitics to more abstract, affective domains.¹⁰ Specifically, I argue that the state is striving to enact a form of what Merje Kuus (2009) characterizes as “cosmopolitan militarism.”¹¹ In her study of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Kuus observes how military institutions like NATO are publicly legitimated and normalized through narratives of global cooperation. The heroes of cosmopolitan militarism, writes Kuus (2009), are “highly educated, smart looking, and upwardly mobile professionals who, armed with sophisticated technology and the language of security talk, can (we are told) manage the whole world” (p. 559). Building on the work of Kuus, I argue that the Kenyan state has actively worked to legitimate the deployment of military force against Al-Shabaab by invoking cosmopolitan norms of peace, security, and the rule of law. What matters here is not whether Kenya in fact upholds these norms, “but rather that it packages or enacts itself as such” (Kuus, 2009: 546). Unlike NATO, however, Kenya must contend with the taken for granted racial and spatial imaginaries that associate certain actors and institutions with leadership, reason and order, and others with submission, irrationality, and violence. I suggest that cosmopolitan militarism in this context is both a scale-making project (Tsing, 2000) and a form of nation branding in which Kenya positions itself outside the imaginative geography of Africa, and instead in the imaginary of the “global.”¹² The flurry of statements issued by Kenyan officials in the context of the #SomeoneTellCNN outcry revealed not simply that the Kenyan brand had been tarnished, but that the state’s narrative about the Kenyan military’s role in Somalia is in fact an integral component of the nation branding project itself.

Between 2013 and 2016, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic study that was broadly concerned with Kenya’s relationship to the War on Terror in East Africa. I began my research in the summer of 2013 in the midst of national debate about the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) charges against the newly elected President and Vice President of Kenya for their role in the 2007 election violence. By the time I returned to Kenya in June 2014, members of the political establishment were grappling with the aftereffects of the September 2013 Westgate Mall attack. As mass-mediated information economies about “unstable” Africa began to intersect with those focused on “violent” Islam, the Kenyan elite were apprehensive about misrepresentation—and the consequences of misrepresentation for the national economy. In the ensuing year, I observed or participated in conversations with politicians, NGO leaders, human rights activists, and young people in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa. However critical many of them were of domestic policies and practices related to the War on Terror—in particular, the growing number of disappearances and extrajudicial killings of Kenyan Muslims at the hands of Kenya’s Anti-Terror Police Unit—few questioned Kenya’s role in Somalia. If and when they expressed an opinion, they defended the military’s presence in Somalia in the language of responsibility. This struck me as paradoxical: how could they be critical of one arm of the Kenyan security apparatus at home, but supportive of another arm abroad?

As I paid closer attention to state-produced discourse on this topic, I began to appreciate why this was the case: the Kenyatta administration has pursued a range of strategies to produce another, more cosmopolitan state that operates abroad. By another state, I refer not to a separate governing entity, but to conceptualizations of “the state” as an ideological artifact, as fantasy (Aretxaga, 2003), or as an effect of a series of practices in which “stateness” is performed (Mitchell, 1991). I am especially interested in nation branding, wherein state actors are tasked with producing favorable and distinctive representations of the nation state; scholars have illustrated that nation branding is not simply for external consumption, but it also has subject-producing effects (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009; Fattal, 2018; Graan, 2013; Osei and Gbadamosi, 2011; Rankin, 2012). In this regard, I am interested in how the self-image of Kenya as exceptional—as global leader and peacekeeper—has been cultivated, particularly among the Kenyan elite.¹³

In light of the fact that Kenya itself was once the subject of international concern in the aftermath of the 2007 election violence, its attempt to (re)-brand has been no small feat. In 2012, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed charges against Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, both of whom were accused of being indirect co-perpetrators of crimes against humanity in 2007–2008.¹⁴ At the time, the two men were campaigning for the office of President and Vice-President, respectively. With the help of British public relations firms, they presented the ICC as a neocolonial entity that was meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation.¹⁵ The irony of hiring British firms to construct such a message aside, the two men successfully consolidated their power despite the criminal charges, assuming office in April 2013.¹⁶ In the aftermath of the Westgate Mall attack later that year, the leaders invoked national security to legitimate the postponement of their respective trials.¹⁷ When both ICC cases were eventually dropped in late 2014, the much anticipated visit from US President Barack Obama the following year signaled that Kenya had regained its position as a respectable player on the world stage.¹⁸

In what follows, I aim to re-center Africa’s relationship to the War on Terror, recalling the significance of August 1998 for the continent. I move away from analysis that limits Kenya’s position to that of a “client” or “proxy” for US interests in the region and instead consider how the Kenyan state navigates its position in an increasingly militarized global economy. I then turn to a discussion of the contemporary interventionist order, where I illustrate that African states increasingly constitute the “face” of military intervention on the continent. I situate this development within a brief history of Pan-African ideas about a unified military command. While the African Union’s (AU’s) emergent security infrastructure might be interpreted as a manifestation of this Pan-African vision, I illustrate that it has produced a differentiated order within Africa, wherein some African states (in this case, Kenya) have emerged as self-declared enforcers of peace and stability on the continent. Next, I consider the significance of colonial rule and the Shifta War of 1963–1967 for the Kenyan state’s construction of Somalis as threatening outsiders. Kenyan officials have built upon historical prejudices about Somalis to legitimate its ongoing war against Al-Shabaab. Finally, I return to the Kenyan military’s role in Somalia, observing how gender and religion are mobilized to shape popular understandings of militarized interventionism. My goal is to shed light on cosmopolitan militarism as a cultural and political project—one that works to direct scrutiny away from the violence of actual military intervention, and that sustains public support for militarism and unending war.

Moving the center

On 7 August 1998, two simultaneous car bombs exploded at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. More than 200 citizens of these countries were killed in the attacks, in addition to 12 Americans. In the ensuing weeks and months, families of the Kenyan and Tanzanian victims confronted the unspoken hierarchies in the US government’s valuation of human lives, as the compensation offered to them paled in comparison to what was offered to their US counterparts. Meanwhile, in retaliation, President Clinton authorized a military strike on Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory (claiming that it was producing chemical weapons), and further strikes on alleged Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan (Devji, 2005). The Al-Shifa factory in Khartoum was the largest manufacturer of medicines in all of Sudan, specializing in antimalarial drugs; its destruction precipitated a medical catastrophe, as economic sanctions blocked Sudan from importing the adequate medicines needed to treat malaria, tuberculosis, and other preventable diseases.¹⁹ Long before 11 September 2001, Kenyans, Tanzanians, and Sudanese were painfully aware of their invisibility as victims, and of their emerging hypervisibility as suspected terrorists (Smith, 2015).

While the mainstream media fixated primarily on the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration had singled out Africa in the months prior as a key source of future US oil supplies (Carmody, 2005; Francis, 2010; Klare and Volman, 2006). Rather than openly acknowledge concerns about an impending energy crisis, US officials used the War on Terror to project ideas about terror and insecurity onto the continent (Sharp, 2011). In November 2001, for example, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Susan Rice characterized Africa as the world’s “soft underbelly for global terrorism.”²⁰ Terrorist networks, she argued, were exploiting the continent’s porous borders and “weak law enforcement and security services.” Narratives like these—invoked regularly by Euro-American policymakers and military strategists since then—have contributed to new, more threatening, understandings of Africa as “place-in-the-world” (Ferguson, 2006). In doing so, they have legitimated the expansion of the US military’s presence on the continent. Since the emergence of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007, the US government has dispatched between 5000 and 8000 military personnel to outposts across the continent.²¹ In 2017, the US military conducted 3500 exercises and programs in Africa—an average of 10 per day.²² After the Middle East, Africa is now home to the highest number of US special operations personnel, with 1700 operatives based in 20 countries.²³ Kenya serves as a hub for US-led special ops raids and drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen, with the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF–HOA) operating from Manda Bay military base in the northeastern town of Lamu (Prestholdt, 2011).

The War on Terror has clearly had a pronounced impact on the organization and production of power and space in Africa (Besteman, 2017; De Waal, 2004; Gluck, 2017; Keenan, 2010; Mullin and Patel, 2015; Mullin and Rouabah, 2018; Omeje, 2008; Prestholdt, 2011). Yet the consequence of a US-centric lens—even if it is motivated by a commitment to anti-imperialism—is that Global South actors are objectified and rendered to the background, understood only as feminized victims, hypermasculine perpetrators, or unthinking proxies (Amar, 2013; Grovogui, 2006; Mamdani, 2009; Rutazibwa, 2014; Sabaratnam, 2011). As Meera Sabaratnam (2013) observes, we have failed to address “the deeper problem of Eurocentrism in how we think and research the international,” which continues to entail the methodological and analytical bypassing of other actors.²⁴

Drawing on the Kenyan writer and philosopher Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I want to “move the center” away from its presumed location in the Global North to consider Kenya’s relationship to the War on Terror. In his book, Moving the Centre, Ngugi (1993) offered a theoretical framework through which to understand the ways that countries in Asia and Africa—in the post-independence period of the 1970s—were “asserting their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their own centers” (p. 4) across the Global South. In focusing on Kenya, my objective is not to replace one “center” with another—indeed, Ngugi (1993) warns against trying to use the vision “from any one center and generalize it as the universal reality” (p. 4). Instead, I take seriously the question of positionality for understandings of global processes and am in dialogue with those who invoke the concept of subalterneity in relation to less powerful actors in the global order (Ayoob, 2002; Bachmann, 2013; Chakrabarty, 2005; Coronil, 1994; Sharp, 2011).²⁵ A feminist analytics of scale enables us to interrogate the very constitution of the macro-picture while attending to contextually specific sites and unrecognized forms of knowledge (Abbas and Mama, 2014; Hyndman, 2004; Katz, 2001; McKittrick, 2006; Sharp, 2007). My objective is neither to celebrate nor condemn, nor to deny the continued significance of asymmetrical power relations between North and South. Instead, I suggest we grapple with the risks that come with master narratives of a US-led “theatre of operations” on one hand, and of the counter-terror industry’s exclusive fixation with Al-Shabaab on the other, attending to the histories and genealogies that are obscured.

Africa to the rescue?

This section traces the changing face of military intervention on the continent, with African states increasingly assuming the role of interveners. I depart from the traditional focus on Africans as objects of external intervention, and trace at the intergovernmental level a shift from the principle of noninterference to an embrace of intervention in the name of global peace and security. While the AU’s emergent security infrastructure might be interpreted as a manifestation of the Pan-African vision championed by Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddafi, I illustrate that it has produced a differentiated order within Africa, wherein some African states have emerged as self-declared enforcers of peace and stability on the continent. I suggest that the deployment of African troops as purported saviors of fellow Africans points to forms of power and difference that cannot be defined along the traditional white/black or core/periphery divides.

“Africa” as idea and geopolitical space has long been racialized as the quintessential other in the global order of nation states (Clarke, 2011; Ferguson, 2006; Grovogui, 2001; Mudimbe, 1988; Pierre, 2012). Discourses of state collapse and violence have generally identified the causes of mayhem within the continent, obscuring the legacies of colonialism and continuing effects of plunder by external forces (Campbell, 1999; Nkrumah, 1965; Rodney, 1982). What interests me here is how difference gets mapped onto place and space, producing what the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said (1978) would refer to as an imaginative geography. Said’s preoccupation at the time was in European and American representational practices that constructed ideas about “the Orient.” Scholars have built upon his work to reflect on the ways in which imaginative geographies produce and naturalize difference, justifying the need for externally led administration and control. For example, the so-called “international community” is generally portrayed as disconnected from territory, white, male, Christian, and guided by morality and neutrality (Grovogui, 1996; Malkki, 1994; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Razack, 2004). In contrast, those in need of saving are black or brown and occupy peripheral regions that are associated with femininity and dependency (O’Reilly, 2012; Orford, 2003; Smith, 2001). The discursive production or “cultural coding” (Springer, 2011) of certain peoples and places is imbricated in racialized notions of governance, rationality, and civilization.

It is in this context that Mahmood Mamdani has characterized the post-colonial global system as a bifurcated one, wherein some states are more sovereign than others. With the introduction of the concept of “the responsibility to protect” in the mid-1990s, Mamdani (2010) argues that the United Nations merely formalized this bifurcated arrangement: those (less powerful) states deemed to be unwilling or unable to protect their own citizens in contexts of violent conflict would be subject to intervention and trusteeship by (more powerful) “responsible” states.²⁶ Policymakers and humanitarian organizations rationalized intervention as a moral and ethical obligation rather than a political act. As Miriam Ticktin (2011) outlines in Casualties of Care, the French organization Médecins Sans Frontières was at the forefront of depoliticizing Global South struggles for social and political change, reconfiguring acting subjects as hapless victims. From the Balkans in the 1990s to Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, the concept of “the responsibility to protect” emerged as an international norm that scholars and activists alike have scrutinized for its conflation of militaristic and humanitarian approaches, and for its imbrication in imperial regimes of war and intervention (Branch, 2011a; Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010; Pandolfi, 2003; Ticktin, 2011). Perhaps most significantly, they have demonstrated that the growing preoccupation with state-building as a conflict prevention strategy has transformed both the content and temporality of intervention, with interveners assuming more expansive and seemingly permanent roles in the affairs of target countries.

Yet the face of intervention is changing. In the wake of the US military’s embarrassing exit from Somalia in 1993 and the subsequent “failure” to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, powerful states in the Global North became wary of assuming leading roles in humanitarian intervention.²⁷ In what many attribute to an effort to free the Global North of the costs associated with intervention—whether in dollars, lives, or legal and political blowback—Euro-American policymakers increasingly emphasized the importance of regionally led processes of conflict resolution (Bachmann, 2012; Chandler, 2012). In a Brookings publication entitled “Sovereignty as Responsibility,” for example, Deng et al. (1996) declared that “Africa has little choice but to confront a wide variety of clashes on the continent and to do so increasingly on its own” (p. 168).

At roughly this time in the late 1990s, an important shift was taking place on the African continent. At a September 1999 summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi proposed the creation of a United States of Africa with a single army and currency, designed to protect the interests of African states in the face of interference from Western powers (Baimu and Sturman, 2003; Forte, 2012). In calling for a United States of Africa, Gaddafi invoked the words of former Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, whose articulation of a Pan-Africanist vision in the 1960s emphasized the importance of one voice to ensure actual—not simply symbolic—independence in the face of neocolonial forces; this vision included the proposed creation of a Union Military Command (Esmenjaud, 2014; Forte, 2012; Nkrumah, 1965). Of particularly concern to Gaddafi 30 years later was the Africa Crisis Response Initiative launched by the Clinton administration in 1996, a precursor to AFRICOM (Campbell, 2013).

Member states agreed to a revamping of the OAU into what would become known as the AU, and South Africa assumed the lead in drafting the Constitutive Act of this new institution. Importantly, the Constitutive Act abandoned the principle of noninterference long upheld by the OAU (Kioko, 2003; Mamdani, 2010; Mepham and Ramsbotham, 2007).²⁸ This shift—adopted at the Heads of State gathering in 2003—reversed the sanctity previously accorded to state sovereignty. Since then, the AU has established its own security architecture, including a Peace and Security Council, a Continental Early Warning System, and an African Standby Force that is capable of deployment in times of crisis.²⁹ While Gaddafi had the funds to support this security infrastructure, his removal from power during the NATO intervention in 2011 left the AU reliant on external sources of funding and thereby vulnerable to other priorities and interests (Forte, 2012). At the same time, the notion of “sovereignty as responsibility” has contributed to a hierarchical political order within Africa, whereby some African states have emerged as self-declared enforcers of peace and stability on the continent.

Ethiopia was the first to intervene in Somalia in December 2006, sending thousands of troops (with US backing) across the border.³⁰ At the time of the invasion, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) had presided over 6 months of relative stability in Somalia (Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009; Ibrahim, 2018; Lindley, 2010). The ICU was an indigenous response to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed warlords, whose drug and weapons trafficking had subjected Somalis to violence and uncertainty.³¹ Its popularity grew not because of a unified Islamist ideology, but because of a shared desire to counteract the warlords. As the International Crisis Group observed in 2005, “The courts’ promise of order and security appeals to Somalis across the religious spectrum. Their heterogeneous membership and diversity of their supporters mean that attempts to label the Sharia system ‘extremist’, ‘moderate’ or any other single orientation are futile.”³² Nevertheless, US officials were convinced that the ICU was controlled by Al-Qaeda and the US military was already engaged in covert efforts to track down Al-Qaeda operatives (Malito, 2015; Prestholdt, 2013).³³ With American-supplied aerial reconnaissance and satellite surveillance, Ethiopian forces drove the ICU into exile “with astonishing speed, force and cruelty” (Rawlence, 2016). In their place emerged more militant factions with an explicit anti-American and anti-occupation agenda. In short, as scholars and analysts have illustrated, the invasion and subsequent occupation planted the seeds for the growth of what is now known as Al-Shabaab (Harper, 2012; Hoehne, 2009; Ibrahim, 2010; Prestholdt, 2013; Scahill, 2013).

Despite the fact that Ethiopia had acted unilaterally—without authorization from either the UN or the AU—neither institution condemned the invasion. Instead, the UN amended the 1992 arms embargo and authorized an African Union-led peacekeeping mission known as AMISOM (African Union Mission in Somalia) to protect the UN-backed Transitional Federal Government. This represented a key opportunity for the AU “to fulfill one of its core missions by asserting ownership over an African conflict” (Wondemagegnehu and Kebede, 2017: 203). While AMISOM’s initial rules of engagement permitted the use of force only when necessary, it began to assume an increasingly offensive role, engaging in counterinsurgency and counter-terror operations (Wondemagegnehu and Kebede, 2017).³⁴ What began as a small deployment of 1650 peacekeepers gradually transformed into a number that exceeded 22,000 as the architects of the intervention soon battled a problem of their own making.³⁵

The AU has, therefore, emerged as a key subcontractor of migrant military labor in Somalia (Al-Bulushi, 2014). Troop-contributing states (Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Uganda) have been able to offset some of the costs of maintaining their militaries at home, as the United States, EU, and other actors cover expenses related to salaries, training, and equipment.³⁶ Cognizant of the fact that these costs are minor when compared with what would be required to deploy the equivalent number of American or European troops to Somalia, leaders from troop-contributing states have skillfully brokered international resources earmarked for “security.”Like Ethiopia, Kenya acted unilaterally in Somalia when it sent its own troops across the border in 2011, intending to create a buffer zone that would keep Al-Shabaab outside of Kenya. Initial statements from high-level Kenyan officials emphasized national security, but the government’s rationales soon morphed into the much broader objectives of regional and international security.³⁷ Following months of negotiations, the AU Peace and Security Council announced that an agreement had been reached to incorporate Kenyan troops into the peacekeeping mission. This was a strategic victory for Kenya, as it not only provided a legitimate basis for maintaining a military presence in Somalia, but also deflected the costs onto the AU’s international donors (Williams, 2018).

Although Kenya has continued to act unilaterally in Somalia, launching airstrikes without oversight or approval from AMISOM, the state has continued to project an image of itself as a leader in multilateral stabilization efforts. Its public relations strategies appear to have paid off: Kenya is now at the front of the rapidly expanding arms race in the region.³⁸ In 2016, the government purchased a Boeing-manufactured ScanEagle drone and acquired eight Huey II military helicopters in what was described as the United States’ “largest single security cooperation initiative ever undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa.”³⁹ That same year, Kenyan military spending rose to a new high of US$993 million, a figure that stood at more than double the spending of neighboring Ethiopia and Uganda combined.⁴⁰

From “bandits” to “terrorists”

Central to any war effort is the construction of an enemy. Together with its allies, Kenya has portrayed Al-Shabaab as a homogeneous entity with a supposedly clear, albeit irrational purpose: terror.⁴¹ This section explores the social construction of Somalis as threatening outsiders, beginning with the legacies of colonial rule. I recount the significance of the Shifta War of 1963–1967, demonstrating that the first proclaimed threat to Kenya’s territorial integrity came in the early days of independence in the form of a secessionist movement led by Somalis living in what became known as Kenya’s North Eastern Province.

Scholars have traced the efforts by colonial officials to assign African subjects distinct ethnic and racial identities, and to link these identities to territory (Mamdani, 1996; Pierre, 2012; Weitzberg, 2017). These processes of differentiation legitimated the introduction of separate laws that governed the lives of “natives” and “non-natives” (Mamdani, 1996). As Mahmood Mamdani documents in Citizen and Subject, Africans were racialized as “natives” and subject to customary law, whereas Europeans, Asians, and Arabs were racialized as “non-natives” and governed by civil law. Somalis—much like Swahilis living along the coast—created a conundrum for colonial officials.⁴² Their historical patterns of mobility, including political, economic, and cultural ties across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, contributed to hybrid identities that defied binary distinctions between native and non-native (Weitzberg, 2017). As a result, colonial officials remained ambivalent about the racial and legal status of Somalis. Believing that they were neither fully African nor fully Arab, the British alternated between conceiving of Somalis as inferior or superior to their “racially distinct” Bantu neighbors (Balakian, 2016; Thompson, 1995; Weitzberg, 2017). As Keren Weitzberg (2017) observes, Somalis emerged as “a quasi-foreign people whose movement into and within the East Africa Protectorate (later Kenya) needed to be carefully controlled” (p. 20).

Somalis themselves have their own racialized ideas about civilization and hierarchy, and those living in the Northern Frontier District of the Kenyan colony (along what would eventually become the border area between Kenya and Somalia) opted to be categorized as non-natives in the colonial racial order, calculating that this designation would protect their privileges vis-à-vis “native” subjects (Weitzberg, 2017). With the end of colonial rule in sight, Somalis living in this region feared that they would be treated as outsiders in the newly established Kenyan state. Despite the findings of a commission of inquiry, which reported that Somalis in the north were nearly unanimous in their preference for secession, British officials announced in March 1963 that the region would remain part of Kenya.⁴³ Following independence, inhabitants of the region refused to participate in the Kenyan elections and instead launched an insurgency in the name of self-determination and unity with the Somali Republic. With support from the Somali government in Mogadishu, they conducted guerilla operations targeting police, security, and administrative personnel. Just 1 month after obtaining independence, Kenya thus found itself embroiled in conflict.⁴⁴

Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta declared a state of emergency in December 1963. Members of his cabinet had worked closely with the British and had direct experience with efforts to contain the anti-colonial Land and Freedom Army (Whittaker, 2014). Kenyatta sought to depoliticize the movement for secession by characterizing it as a criminal insurgency (Weitzberg, 2017). Government officials regularly referred to the separatists as “shifta,” a term for bandit that had been associated with subversive anti-state activity.⁴⁵ The Kenyan government’s framing of the conflict as one between the lawful state and “lawless” rebels allowed it to justify the collective punishment of a group that it deemed to be “un-Kenyan.” With assistance from the British military, Kenya launched a counter-insurgency campaign, erecting detention camps for suspicious persons. Paramilitary units formed during the colonial state of emergency were allowed to arrest, detain, and shoot suspected rebels, and to confiscate livestock and property (Bachmann, 2012: 131). Despite a negotiated end to this war in 1967, the state of emergency remained in effect until 1991, placing northern Kenya in a separate legal regime for nearly 30 years (Lochery, 2012; Weitzberg, 2017).

Since the emergence of Al-Shabaab, Kenyan officials have built upon historical prejudices about Somalis as threatening outsiders to legitimate policing and military operations against individuals identified as suspected terrorists. The mobilization of fear toward Muslims more generally has enabled the state to justify rights abuses against the Muslim minority population, with those living in Nairobi, Mombasa, and northeastern Kenya most affected. In April 2014, more than 6000 security personnel descended on the predominantly Somali neighborhood of Eastleigh in Nairobi to “weed out” non-Kenyans.⁴⁶ The subsequent internment of over 1000 Somali refugees in Nairobi’s Kasarani stadium elicited concern and condemnation at home and abroad. In a newspaper editorial, Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga disparaged the state’s collective punishment tactics, arguing that they reminded him of the days of the anti-colonial struggle, “when the British handled the Kenyans in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable.”⁴⁷

Cosmopolitan militarism

When the KDF invaded southern Somalia in 2011, Kenyans were taken aback. Never before had the state sent its military into sustained combat abroad.⁴⁸ At the time, the country was desperately trying to heal from the scars of the 2007 election violence. Despite the formation of a Government of National Unity, power struggles continued. The revised constitution of 2010, much like the troubled truth and reconciliation process, had done little to bring people together. While Kenyans had initially expressed support for the ICC’s role in holding perpetrators of the 2007 violence accountable, public opinion grew increasingly polarized in the midst of debates about the power politics that influenced the Court’s work (Clarke, 2009; Malik, 2016; Mueller, 2014). But as Kenyan analyst Patrick Gathara observes, “if there is one thing that can be relied on to rally a people, it is war. And war was what the media branded the invasion.”⁴⁹

In this section, I explore how the war against Al-Shabaab has provided a stage for the production of new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya’s place in the world. Specifically, I consider how performance, ritual, and public relations strategies work to distinguish Kenya as a global leader on peace and security, and to cultivate affective attachments to the military.⁵⁰ I consider the significance of gender for the projection of state power, and grapple with the intersection of religion and politics in the cultivation of ideas about just war. My goal is to make sense of continued public support for the KDF role in Somalia—especially evident in the social media hashtags #IStandWithKDF—despite the reality that this war has spilled over into Kenyan territory. While Kenyans have expressed anger, despair, and frustration in the wake of mounting attacks by Al-Shabaab inside of Kenya, they generally remain reluctant to question what they perceive as Kenya’s obligations to the international community on the question of peace and security in the region.

Prior to the invasion, state and military officials acknowledged the importance of nurturing and sustaining public support (Molony, 2018). This is most apparent in the Ministry of Defense publication Operation Linda Nchi: Kenya’s Military Experience in Somalia, released in 2014. The first section of this publication is devoted to the concept of just war and goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the invasion was legitimate under international law. Observing that Article 51 of the UN Charter requires that any measure taken in the name of self-defense must be in the interest of the restoration of peace and security, the book proclaims that “this process is what the Kenyan political class took up to explain the case locally, regionally, and internationally” (Migue and Oluoch, 2014). The authors speak simultaneously about the importance of soft power and the battle for hearts and minds, stating that the KDF “was not greeted with hostilities, but with love from the Somali population.” As one reviewer observes about this triumphant account, “A military resolution of the conflict had to be marketed as humanitarian, viable, and necessary.”⁵¹

Historically, Kenya has been a key contributor to UN peacekeeping efforts, but has been reluctant to dispatch troops to peace operations with an enforcement component. Its role in AMISOM represents a departure in that regard, as does the state’s emergent interest in military-related rituals. Since 2011, the Ministry of Defense has worked alongside the state corporation Brand Kenya to create national attachments to the military. On the 1-year anniversary of the invasion, Brand Kenya hosted the first annual “Kenya Defense Forces Day” in which Kenyans were encouraged to express their support for the military and school children presented goodwill messages to the troops.⁵² The Kenyan military parade has become a highlight of the annual Jamhuri Day celebrations at Nyayo stadium, where thousands gather to celebrate Kenya’s independence. Beyond official gatherings, the Kenyatta administration has woven references to the military into his daily appearances, normalizing the presence of the military in public life. In September 2014, for example, photos emerged of President Kenyatta walking the corridors of State House clad in military attire. Since then, he has appeared in military uniform on numerous occasions, arguing that he wants to build unity and support for Kenyan soldiers who have sacrificed on behalf of the nation. And in a surprise televised visit to Kenyan troops in Somalia in 2017, the President made an emotional appeal, again in uniform, “to keep spirits high.”⁵³ Kenyatta’s actions represent a marked shift from his predecessors: following two failed coup attempts in the 1970s and 1980s, prior heads of state maintained an uneasy, if not paranoid relationship to the armed forces (Branch and Cheeseman, 2009; Gathara, 2017). For this reason, they rarely associated themselves so directly with the military.⁵⁴

Image: KDF Recruitment poster

The state’s rhetoric about sacrifice has religious overtones.⁵⁵ While the Kenyan state is secular in name, it is what Alamin Mazrui (1993) characterizes as a “Christian-oriented order” (see also Haugerud, 1995; Smith, 2012).⁵⁶ At the heart of the war with Al-Shabaab is a Christian sensibility that has an increasingly tense relationship with the country’s Muslim minority population (Gifford, 2009; Mwakimako, 2007; Ndzovu, 2014); these tensions extend to the military itself, where Muslim officers have recently resigned from their posts out of frustration with what they characterized as institutionalized suspicion toward Muslim service members.⁵⁷ Even as the President has publicly championed the importance of unity, arguing that “national security knows no politics, religion or ethnic boundaries,”⁵⁸ the subtext of much of the state’s discourse is that an explicitly Christian morality guides the military’s actions against what it describes (in relation to Al-Shabaab) as “the very epitome of evil” (Migue and Oluoch, 2014).⁵⁹ In the aftermath of an Al-Shabaab attack on a Kenyan military base in Somalia in January 2016, for example, the President delivered a speech in honor of the fallen soldiers. These lines in particular point to the theological underpinnings of Kenya’s war with Al-Shabaab:

Let us rally behind our gallant soldiers. Let us thank God for them and ask for His protection and guidance over them … I close by asking each and everyone of you to pray for our heroes and their families, and for all our forces in Somalia, as well as those within our borders, who spend sleepless nights in ensuring that we are all safe and we pray that they may prevail against the enemy … God bless you, God bless Kenya and God bless our fallen heroes.⁶⁰

The emergent symbolism attached to the military is not only religiously inflected but also highly gendered.⁶¹ State power in Kenya has long been constructed as a male affair (Musila, 2009; Nasong’o and Ayot, 2007; Ossome, 2018). Grace Musila (2009, 2012) traces distinct forms of hegemonic masculinity over the course of Kenyan history, pointing to the continued significance of the phallus for the performance of power.⁶² The mobilization of violent masculinity has generally been limited to national politics, but the emergence of Al-Shabaab triggered gendered anxieties about the military. Prior to the invasion, President Museveni of Uganda (who had already sent troops to Somalia) questioned the masculinity of the Kenyan military when he mocked the KDF as a “career army” that was unable to venture into real war.⁶³ When a leading journalist with the Daily Nation disparaged what he characterized as “the seeming impotence of our security apparatus,” blogger Keguro Macharia observed that war would, therefore, function akin to Viagra. “Our boys will prove they are MEN. No. Longer. Impotent.”⁶⁴

At the same time, the fact that the Kenyan military’s presence in Somalia is framed in the language of peacekeeping has made possible its transformation into a masculine “force for good.”⁶⁵ As peacekeepers, Kenyan troops can assume the image of “agents of progress, democratic values, peace, and security” (Duncanson, 2009: 73).⁶⁶ They emerge as black knights—heroes who have sacrificed their lives for the greater good.⁶⁷ This peacekeeper masculinity—nurtured by a modernist Christian state—stands in contrast to the Al-Shabaab militant, who is presented not only as anti-modern and anti-Christian, but also as terrifyingly hypermasculine: aggressive, irrational, and violent.⁶⁸

Men are not alone in assuming stereotypically masculine gender roles (Amadiume, 1987; Decker, 2014; Ombati, 2015). Kenyatta has astutely drawn upon discourses of gender equality to appoint women to prominent cabinet positions that require them to defend the state’s military adventurism. Rachel Omamo became Cabinet Secretary for Defense in 2013 while Amina Mohamed became Foreign Minister. Mohamed in particular assumed the public face of the Kenyan state as it rationalized its counter-terror policies at home and abroad. In 2016, for example, she defended Kenya’s plan to close Dadaab refugee camp in the northeastern part of the country on the grounds that Somali refugees constituted a security threat. Mohamed simultaneously framed the state’s decision in humanitarian terms, claiming that the closure of the camp would “not only end a life of decades in exile, but also enable the refugees to regain their human dignity.”⁶⁹ During her tenure as Foreign Minister, Mohamed was a reliable security feminist (Grewal, 2017)—sufficiently attentive to humanitarian concerns, but without allowing these concerns to cloud her judgment on security. The state has therefore employed gender “equality” to serve the project of militarism and counter-terror, leaving the structures of patriarchy and violent masculinity intact.⁷⁰

The cultivation of pride and innocence around the military is sustained through the careful censorship of the brutality of actual war (Bernal, 2014; Lutz, 2009). Military recruitment posters present proud (and noticeably happy) young men and women in uniform, yet these carefully choreographed images are dislocated from actual Kenyans standing on the frontlines of violence and war. It is fitting that the state has actively sought to suppress media coverage not only of the loss of Somali lives, but also equally of attacks on Kenyan troops (Molony, 2018).⁷¹ Cosmopolitan militarism, therefore, cultivates what Talal Asad (2009) refers to as an “etiquette of death dealing” that differentiates between lives that are worthy of grief and those that are not.⁷² The recognition of Kenyan troop casualties (beyond large-scale, spectacular events such as the January 2016 El Adde attack) risks jeopardizing masculine attributes of strength and stoicism, while xenophobic ideas about the irrational Somali/Muslim militant cultivate a “disposition of disregard” (Stoler, 2009) for Somali life, making it possible for Kenyans to look away from the violence and destruction ongoing in Somalia—even as Somalis continue to flee that violence and seek refuge in Kenya.

Conclusion

At the seventh annual KDF Day in October 2018, President Kenyatta called for the nation to recognize the troops who had died in the line of duty. The President was adamant that the Kenyan military would not relent in the fight against terrorism. “Our region continues to experience major security challenges emanating from terror networks,” he declared. “We will maintain our presence in Somalia under AMISOM until our security objective and those of the international community are achieved.”⁷³ As the 10-year mark since Kenya’s invasion approaches, war is no longer an exception to Kenyan history and politics. If the President’s words are any indication, the task of “restoring stability” to Somalia through war may in fact become a permanent one.⁷⁴

My objective in this article has been to illustrate how the Kenyatta administration has worked to shape a differentiated order within Africa, branding Kenya a global leader in the crusade for “security.” The project of cosmopolitan militarism is central to this endeavor, cultivating new imaginative geographies, militarized masculinities, and religiously inflected attachments to war. Indeed, the #SomeoneTellCNN affair confirmed Kenya’s self-image as exceptional—“nothing like the countries that have real war.” I have grappled with how this self-image has come to be seen as natural and self-evident, particularly among the Kenyan elite. More specifically, I have attempted to unpack how the space of “war” (Somalia) is conceptualized as disconnected from the space of “peace” (Kenya).

Somalia has now been militarily occupied for 12 years by an assemblage of supranational armed actors. As such, even the most circumscribed geography of “Somalia” is enmeshed in a wider web of interests, practices, and spaces that resemble Carolyn Nordstrom’s notion of a warscape (Nordstrom, 1997). Alongside the troops, power brokers and arms dealers are the public relations strategists who direct attention away from relational histories—in this case, of Kenya’s historical and ongoing entanglement with Somalia. As Kenyans grapple with their own imbrication and complicity in the mounting violence, so too will they contend with the contradictions of cosmopolitan militarism. From the expanding presence of police and military checkpoints on Kenyan streets to the rising death count on both sides of the border, artists, writers, and activists are drawing attention to the realities rendered invisible by war and strategies of nation branding.⁷⁵ We are hereby reminded that even as spectacle produces political power, it simultaneously invites transgressions (Wedeen, 1999). To the extent that we continue to follow the War on Terror from this particular center, we may find alternative imaginings of the future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Renee Ragin and Giulia Ricco, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. I benefited from presenting this material at Yale University in September 2017. In addition, I thank Paul Amar, Hannah Appel, Sahana Ghosh, Zahra Moloo, Zachary Mondesire, and Corinna Mullin for reading and commenting on early drafts of this piece, and Kristin Peterson for our discussions on the political economy of military intervention in Africa.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Henry Luce Foundation, and Yale University’s MacMillan Center. The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program provided financial support towards writing this article.

Notes

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