UC Irvine

This dissertation contributes to public and scholarly discourse around urban sociality in Africa. Unlike the literature on private security and the public sphere that replicates stereotypes about violence and the closing down of sociality, I show that the massive and growing presence of private security around Nairobi brings new forms of sociality. Private guards maintain close ties with people “back home” and associate with hawkers and other urban migrants as well as the people who live and work in the area of the property they guard creating new sets of obligations that sit alongside and at crosscurrents to the securitized landscape.

Informed by Africanist literature on law, space and conceptions of order, refracted through postcolonial critique, my project situates the contemporary security moment in Kenya in the context of debates over postcolonial public spheres and the relationship among economic value and moral values. The dissertation sheds light on the social and political consequences of global concerns around human rights, public space, and public interaction including the marginalization of urban migrants and the silencing of that history. It contributes to the fields of political and economic anthropology, urban and African studies, and interdisciplinary research on security regimes, their technologies, rituals and relations.

The dissertation also contributes to the anthropology of the state through a critique of Actor Network Theory. Rather than just look at state subjects, this dissertation looks at state agents such as the police and people who carry out tasks of the state like private guards. Security is delivered to customers in Kenya through a web of relations between guards and police, the mangers of private security companies, bureaucrats and NGO workers. I move between both sides of the interface; the point-counterpoints of state and non-state groups, the switchbacks between formal representations of security and the messy incoherence of the delivery of security services and cash, between the idealizations of free and open public spheres and the practices of the people that promote them that contradict those ideals, to get to matters of concern rather than matters of fact. I argue the state refounds its own logic in the daily experiences of the police and in fact also the practices of private security involved in the cash-in-transit sector, riding roughshod over the messiness to produce a rationality effect that sustains ideas of a public sphere and a rational government.