P/CVE-as-counterinsurgency: Police violence and police reform in Kenya's counterterrorism agenda

Summary

This article considers the calls for police reform and the continuation of police brutality to be twinning modes of policing within Kenya’s broader counterterrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) architecture. Rather than seeing ongoing police brutality as a failure of, or at odds with, calls for police reform, we argue that what appears to be a paradox is actually indicative of a dialectic central to civil counterinsurgency – a dialectic comprising what we call ‘coercive compliance’ and ‘abject coercion’. Based on extensive field research in Kenya, this article centers the institution of the police as an integral mode of P/CVE-as-counterinsurgency to analyze various manifestations of police power, including international compliance vis-a-vis police reform, police brutality, and community engagement. We further theorize P/CVE-as-counterinsurgency in conversation with Kenya’s colonial history, arguing that police violence is neither new nor unique to today’s counterterrorism regime. Rather, we argue that contemporary policing in Kenya contains sediment of racialized counterinsurgency tactics that were critical to colonial rule in the mid-20th century. In conclusion, we offer reflections on other security contexts where the dialectic of coercive compliance and abject coercion might serve as a useful analytic.

Keywords

Counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, Kenya, police, security, violent extremism