GUNS, LAND, AND VOTES: CATTLE RUSTLING AND THE POLITICS OF BOUNDARY (RE)MAKING IN NORTHERN KENYA

Livestock raiding among northern Kenya's pastoralists has changed profoundly in the last decades. Fought with modern weaponry and often extreme violence, raiding is increasingly enmeshed in politicized claims over administrative boundaries, struggles for exclusive access to land, and attempts to establish or safeguard an ethnically homogeneous electoral base. These conflicts are part of Kenya's troubled politics of decentralization and as such they must be viewed in the context of wider political developments in the country. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in East Pokot and surrounding areas in Kenya's Central Rift Valley Province, this article demonstrates how livestock raiding emerges as a specific form of violent regulation, a well-adapted, dangerous, and powerful political weapon.