The Business of Peace: Raiding and Peace Work Along the Kenya–Uganda Border (Part I)

Peace-building NGOs are frequently at work along the Kenya–Uganda border. But in this desolate region, results have been extremely sparse. This article contends that this is due to the inadequacies of contemporary understandings of cattle raiding. Most NGOs and many academics ascribe cattle raids to a familiar array of factors such as resource scarcity, small arms proliferation, and generational conflict. While each issue is obviously of some relevance, such explanations are too cumbersome to really enhance our knowledge of cattle raiding. This article proposes a new approach to the problem by utilizing popular conceptions of ethnicity and criminal responsibility for raids. Given that most major raids originally stem from seemingly insignificant thefts, the process of retaliation is seen as crucial to understanding why violence escalates in certain situations and defuses in others. The failure of NGOs engaged in peace work to address this important issue in a meaningful way is the reason they have failed to achieve much success along the Kenya–Uganda border. This is in turn responsible for the widespread cynicism and corruption that has crept into their work, and is the subject of the second part of this article.