Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how police oversight in Kenya is experienced from the receiving end of police violence. Introducing oversight overload, it shows how proliferating accountability mechanisms disperse responsibility and dull the political force of complaint-making.

Paper long abstract

Dominant discourses of police reform in Kenya frame oversight as a technical solution to police violence, promising transparency and accountability. From the receiving end of police power, however, these reforms are often experienced less as protection than as an opaque and unsettling extension of institutional authority. In this paper, I examine how communities, complainants, and oversight actors encounter, interpret, and attempt to navigate the proliferating architectures of police oversight that have emerged along Kenya’s police reform trajectory.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, I focus on how cases of police (mis)conduct are seen, documented, and pursued through multiple oversight channels. I analyse two interconnected domains: investigations into police violence and the lodging and management of complaints against police officers. For those subjected to police coercion, engaging oversight mechanisms becomes a form of counter-seeing—an effort to render police violence legible, actionable, and accountable. Yet this work unfolds within a fragmented landscape of state and non-state institutions with overlapping mandates and competing logics. I introduce the concept of oversight overload to describe how this multiplicity generates uncertainty, disperses responsibility, and frequently frustrates attempts to make police violence visible. Rather than enhancing accountability, oversight overload often obscures lines of authority, exhausts complainants, and dulls the political force of complaint-making itself. Attending to the embodied, affective, and practical labour of pursuing justice, the paper argues that oversight is not merely an institutional arrangement but a lived and contested practice of sensing and engaging the state.