Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the governance of oil development in northern Kenya’s and the consequences of these for local institutions and conflict. It examines how oil development in the region has become enmeshed in a web of political and economic relations, overlapping and at multiple levels.

Paper long abstract:

Frontier oil exploration is happening increasingly at the margins in sub-Saharan Africa. Extractive development is expected to be accompanied by increased state presence in these areas, and thus stimulate a transformation of local governance arrangements and institutions, including those that support peacebuilding. Over the past 5 years, oil exploration operations have multiplied across northern Kenya, a region with legacies of violence and a tenuous relationship with the state. This has coincided with Kenya's political devolution as a way of reducing national political violence. Yet, since then levels of sub-national violence have increased across Kenya, with many pointing to the changing ethnic arithmetic brought about by devolution. New county-level governments are benefitting from a windfall of public resources, and at least some of the new violence relates to contestations for local supremacy and power. Yet, devolution also creates a new layer of citizenship, which is animating resource politics and the renegotiation of longstanding alliances and rivalries. This paper uses findings from a household survey and other qualitative fieldwork carried out in south Turkana in 2016, complemented with archival analysis, to assess the implications of oil development on dynamics of security and peacebuilding. It examines the dilemmas and prospects of oil exploration generating new conflict risks at the margins at the same time that devolution raises the spectre of old disputes around borders, identities and territory.