Paper short abstract:

Students have acted together to set hundreds of fires in secondary schools across Kenya. They explain this arson as protest (i.e. ‘strikes’) against unjust practices of authority over their lives. This paper considers how students’ strikes, including arson attacks, affect political subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

Students have acted together to set hundreds of fires in secondary schools across Kenya. They explain this arson as protest (i.e. ‘strikes’) against unjust practices of authority over their lives. This paper considers two ways of understanding how students’ collective contentious actions, including arson attacks, affect political subjectivities. First, I examine how young Kenyans remember their experiences of participating in school strikes, including arson attacks. Second, I consider how students’ strikes are debated in Kenyan public discourse. Students’ personal narratives reveal the profundity of their strike experiences specifically, and secondary school experiences more generally, in the formation of understandings of how power is organized hierarchically and violently in Kenya as well as the impoverished potential for collective protest actions in Kenya. On this basis, I argue that school strikes contribute to the formation of young Kenyans into cynical and docile political subjects. However, public discourse reveals more ambivalence; while students’ strikes are condemned as irresponsible and dangerous, they are also understood as justified because students’ more peaceful appeals are neglected. I argue this ambivalence signals enduring public acceptance for students to rebel against injustice and overly authoritarian governance.