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AbstractStudying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiations of dominant gender norms to elucidate how these inform their social navigation towards male respectability, now and in the future. Adding the dimension of positionality here is useful to bring out how individual negotiations of gender norms in space and over time allows a nuanced view on situated entanglements of aspirations, pathways and dominant discourses and how these convolute and intensify in particular decision-making processes. The analyses are based on longitudinal ethnographic research with youth gangs in Nairobi for four months annually on average since 2005.

AbstractIn line with global trends, community policing has been a vehicle for transforming the state police in Kenya. This article analyses various community policing efforts in Kenya and argues that many of these initiatives have largely failed to act as a vehicle for transformation due to three interconnected problems of diversity, representation, and ownership. The first problem—diversity—relates to the multiplicity of definitions, manifestations, and practices of community policing, which creates uncertainty and provides space for various actors to engage with it in conflicting ways. The second problem—representation—concerns the identification and creation of the 'community': this remains to occur in a state-driven manner and is also not a straightforward concept or organizational unit, especially in a highly multi-ethnic and classed setting as Kenya. The third is ownership: community policing is not experienced or exercised as a partnership, but as a state-centric framework that should remain under the direction and ownership of the state police. We make our claim by focusing on Likoni, Mombasa and drawing from further qualitative data conducted by both authors in Kenya.

In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi's poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and politicians; dynamics informed by differently situated understandings and diverse experiences of democracy. We follow the emic use of the term kupona (Kiswahili word meaning recovery or healing) to approach youth's political engagements along lines of participation, recognition, and re-distribution, which all in different ways express demands for social recovery. Empirically, the article draws on events and examples from the primary elections in 2017, which provide a privileged frame for investigating local politics and responses to the recently initiated devolved government structure.