IEA

Fellowship from October 2010 to June 2011

Research project:

"Keeping peace in Kuria: film and a vigilante movement in rural Kenya"

Problems of governance have become a focus of attention in Africa. At the local level, the lack of capacity and/or the systemic corruption of the official agents of law enforcement, the police and judiciary, have spawned a mass of vigilante-type movements. This research focuses on one such movement in Kenya, known as sungusungu, which spread up from Tanzania into Kenya in the late 1990s. Current research concentrates on the movement in a rural area of Kenya ten years after it began and involves film as well as more usual forms of academic research and writing. A key area of the research is the question of whether such movements can provide long-term solutions to insecurity, given the dynamic politics of this region of East Africa. The film adds a further dimension in giving a view from the ‘inside’. In the contested domain of vigilantism, a film giving voice to the views of local people on its necessity and problems has special value in providing an informed context for debate, available equally to the specialist and non-specialist.

Biographical elements:

"My early research concentrated on issues of violence, masculinity and ritual among the Gisu of Uganda. Recently, my interests have moved into two other areas, HIV/AIDS and vigilantism in East Africa. Work on AIDS began during the two years that I spent teaching at the University of Botswana (1997-99). Since then, I have also returned to fieldwork among the Kuria of Kenya. Initially, funded by the ESRC, this research aimed to explore the social and economic effects of smallholder contract farming and involved a panel survey, conducted in 1984/5 and again in 1994/5. In 2002, under the aegis of the Crisis States Research centre, I began work on sungusungu, tracing its history in Tanzania and its later penetration into Kuria District, Kenya".

For further information: personal webpage of Suzette Heald at LSE