Paper short abstract:

This paper explores policing relations between hawkers and Inspectorate officers in central Nairobi with an attention to intimacies. It discusses how violence is embedded in exchange relations between officers and hawkers, and how we might understand state-formation in this light.

Paper long abstract:

News media in Kenya regularly features reports about the violent relationship between illegalized street hawkers in central Nairobi and the County Inspectorate officers tasked with policing them. Pictures of burning vehicles, streets covered in tear gas, and officers in riot gear are accompanied by variations over the same urban myth of two figures locked in eternal battle: the ruthless, bribe-greedy County officer pitted against the cunning hawker, always ready to run. In this ethnographically informed presentation, I argue that violent clashes such as those reported in the media arise out of a policing relationship that in other respects is marked by forms of intimacy. These include neighborly intimacy, mediated through gift exchange relations that regulate hawkers' and officers' shared use of the inner city. They include hawkers' embodiment of the policing they are subject to, an intimate implication of the other in one's movements, and they include officers' responding to moral claims in their encounters with female hawkers who carry young children. Using intimacies of policing as a vantage point from which to see periodical eruptions of violence in officer-hawker relations, the paper discusses how violence can be implicated in exchange relations, and how we might understand state-formation in such relations. This discussion brings together economic anthropology literature, such as Strathern's notion of "compelling" in gift exchanges, with Africanist literature on state-formation working through personal relationships, such as Roitman's discussion of the "frontier".