Violent Futures?

Large-scale planning schemes are usually accompanied by contested, future-oriented claim-making that, often enough, escalates into violent clashes or leads to new formations of organized violence (e.g. privatization, militarisation). The project aims to investigates such interplays between future-oriented claim making and organized violence. In the current phase we will turn the concept of frontiers into an analytical tool for undertaking systematic and comparative empirical research of development corridors in Kenya and Tanzania.

• How can an understanding of violent dynamics in frontier constellations contribute to developing measures for mitigating their most destructive effects?

• What analytical advantages can be gained from applying our frontier concept to regions where the socioeconomic context differs from the cases studied in the previous phase?

• Qualitative Interviews with representatives of the government, communities, NGOs, and private companies
• Analysis of various databases and the interactive map of violent incidents generated in phase one
• Analysis of archival reports, media and secondary literature
• Field visits and working sessions in Bonn and Kenya

We conducted qualitative field research along the LAPSSET corridor in Northern Kenya. Our main areas of research were the counties of Turkana, Samburu, Baringo, and Isiolo. With respect to our concept of frontiers, the following findings are important:

• State of exception: Large parts of the rangelands are trust land, administered by the counties on behalf of pastoral communities. It can therefore be acquired by the state with fewer legal constraints than titled freehold land.
• Frontier habitus: A ‘frontier habitus’ of planners that disregards existing social orders led to fears of marginalization, and loss of livelihood options among pastoral communities. The “dreamscape” of planners, however, also drew in different parts of the local population, who aspired towards venturing into agriculture, ranging, and new businesses.
• Dispossessions: Already rumours and mere announcements concerning the LAPSSET corridor exacerbated social inequalities through actual or threatened displacements and the reduction of rangelands.
• Blurring the lines: The new infrastructure development in combination with the presence of wildlife conservancies led to a blurring of the lines between armed state actors, the private sector, and security forces at the community level.
• Direct violence: Repeated quarrels over hoped-for benefits from the LAPSSET corridor have led to a reinforcement of ethnic boundaries accompanied by politically incited violence along county borders.

In a nutshell, the partially violent competition over land and boundaries and the blurring of the lines between state, private, and community structures of organized violence indicate an ongoing process of negotiation about social orders along the LAPSSET corridor.

Large-scale planning schemes initiate frontiers which emerge as fluid boundaries between different forms of land-use. Such frontiers are sites of contestations and violent conflicts, where contradicting imaginations of the future collide. Social-ecological transformation thus goes hand in hand with a re-arrangement of organized violence. The project highlights the unintended consequences of a certain vision (frontier habitus) that planners and entrepreneurs have of developing a supposedly ‘empty space’.