Paper short abstract:

This paper elaborates the concept of ‘coercive reconciliation’ as a useful framework, marrying counterinsurgency to post-war outcomes. It takes as its specific example the Kenyan Emergency, when the British sought to coercively rebuild Central Kenya economically, politically and psychologically.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to re-evaluate late-colonial counterinsurgency in light of the frameworks of reconciliation and future-making, using the 1952-1960 Kenyan Emergency as a case study. Counterinsurgency efforts generally, and late-colonial campaigns especially, ought to be understood as open-ended, future-oriented efforts. While often rolled into in an ad hoc and chaotic manner, their intended outcomes reveal much about processes of state-building and nation-making so crucial to the late-colonial and decolonisation periods. The panoply of coercive measures, often including extreme racialised violence, was always to serve a purpose. Therefore, the conceptually separated frameworks of counterinsurgency and reconciliation ought to be brought together in the concept of ‘coercive reconciliation’.

The Kenyan case specifically is illustrative. Literature on the conflict, especially in the last fifteen years, has emphasised the brutal violence of the colonial state against the Kenyan Mau Mau rebels. Particular stress has been laid on the archipelagic ‘pipeline’ of detention camps and the human suffering in the Emergency Villages. This paper seeks to understand what purpose this violence served beyond the immediate needs of withholding civilian support to the freedom fighters. In particular, it looks at how the colonial state wanted to build a new Central Kenya safe for a further generation of colonial rule, with a transformed economic, political and psychological set-up. Fuelled by ethno-psychiatry and modernisation theory, Kenyans were to be reconciled under a energised ruling class of loyalists. It will end with a discussion of the long-term, post-colonial, legacies of this process.