Presentation short abstract

This study analyzes how Kenya's devolution reconfigured rural governance into new regimes of dispossession. By weaponizing ethnicity and eroding pastoral moral economies, administrative boundaries now drive calculated terror, displacement, and violent land enclosure.

Presentation long abstract

The 2010 Constitution of Kenya introduced devolution to redress historical marginalization, yet in the northern frontiers, this political restructuring has unintentionally assembled new regimes of dispossession. Responding to the panel’s call to ground conflict analysis in political ecology, this study challenges simplistic narratives that attribute violence in Northern Kenya to mere ethnic hatred or climatic scarcity. Instead, I argue that ethnicity is being weaponized to achieve dispossession, transforming administrative boundaries into instruments of land enclosure and accumulation. Drawing on qualitative research (2022–2024) in the contested borderlands of Baringo, Turkana, Samburu and West Pokot Counties, the paper uses assemblage theory to examine how new state policies, territorial narratives, and local actors converge to reconfigure rural governance. The paper analyzes the erosion of the pastoral moral economy, showing how practices once rooted in redistributive survival, such as cattle raiding, have mutated into calculated campaigns of terror aimed at displacement. In this fenced future, devolution has not brought equity but has reassembled the landscape into a theatre of violent resource competition. The findings illustrate how the territorialization of ethnicity perpetuates cycles of forced migration and insecurity, offering a grounded political ecology of how state-building processes drive dispossession in non-Western contexts.