Jeremy Lind

Adaptation as a Political Process: Adjusting to Drought and Conflict in Kenya’s Drylands

In this article, we argue that people’s adjustments to multiple shocks and changes, such as conflict and drought, are intrinsically political processes that have uneven outcomes. Strengthening local adaptive capacity is a critical component of adapting to climate change. Based on fieldwork in two areas in Kenya, we investigate how people seek to access livelihood adjustment options and promote particular adaptation interests through forming social relations and political alliances to influence collective decision-making. First, we find that, in the face of drought and conflict, relations are formed among individuals, politicians, customary institutions, and government administration aimed at retaining or strengthening power bases in addition to securing material means of survival. Second, national economic and political structures and processes affect local adaptive capacity in fundamental ways, such as through the unequal allocation of resources across regions, development policy biased against pastoralism, and competition for elected political positions. Third, conflict is part and parcel of the adaptation process, not just an external factor inhibiting local adaptation strategies. Fourth, there are relative winners and losers of adaptation, but whether or not local adjustments to drought and conflict compound existing inequalities depends on power relations at multiple geographic scales that shape how conflicting interests are negotiated locally. Climate change adaptation policies are unlikely to be successful or minimize inequity unless the political dimensions of local adaptation are considered; however, existing power structures and conflicts of interests represent political obstacles to developing such policies.

Changing Donor Policy and Practice in Civil Society in the Post-9/11 Aid Context

Abstract This article argues that the global ‘War on Terror’ regime has contributed in complex and differentiated ways to the increasing securitisation of development policy and practice. The global ‘War on Terror’ regime refers to a complex and contradictory weaving of discourses, political alliances, policy and legislative changes, institutional arrangements and practices. This is manifest in aid rhetoric, policy discourse, institutional convergence and programming. These processes have in turn affected the way donor agencies engage with non-governmental actors. On the one hand they have led to new forms of control over charitable agencies; on the other hand they have created new opportunities for interaction and resource access to ‘newly discovered’ civil society actors such as Muslim organisations and communities. The article explores these issues through the lens of development policy and practice by four donor countries, namely, the USA, Sweden, the UK and Australia.

Introduction: security in the vernacular and peacebuilding at the margins; rethinking violence reduction

Abstract This article introduces a Peacebuilding special issue on rethinking security, peacebuilding and violence reduction in the light of Sustainable Development Goal 16 on ‘promoting peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development’. The special issue presents new analysis and case studies, which aim to challenge and refresh the established policy consensus around violence reduction and security. They are distinctive in focusing upon the vernacular or local understandings of those at the receiving end of direct and structural violence; and in analysing the insurgent margins where violence and insecurity are most concentrated.

‘Killing a mosquito with a hammer’: Al-Shabaab violence and state security responses in Kenya

Abstract Networked, transnational forms of violence pose a significant threat to peace and security in a number of sub-Saharan African countries. In recent years, Kenya has witnessed an expanding number of attacks involving Al-Shabaab – the Somali-based militant organisation. Kenya’s state responses to these attacks derive from a social construction of Somalis as a threatening presence, justifying a raft of hard security measures. However, this targeting has been counter-productive by driving a deeper wedge between Somalis, other Muslims and the state, and levels of Al-Shabaab violence have remained high. Seen from the social and political margins that Kenya’s Somali and Muslim populations occupy, recent violence continues a long-standing dynamic of insecurity in which the state itself is a central actor. Internal stress relating to state-led planning of social order built on unequal citizenships and the use of violence, enmesh with the external threat of Al-Shabaab, producing the conditions for insurgency and violence to spread. Reducing violence and building peace require greater understanding of how violence and security are seen and experienced at the margins.

Civil Society, Security and Aid in India

Unlike Kenya, India is not a country where Al Qaeda attacks on US targets have been carried out. Unlike Afghanistan, it is not a country where Al Qaeda or affiliated organisations have cells from which they have organised jihadi attacks. Nor is it a country where military intervention has occurred in pursuit of the War on Terror. Still, India has a lengthy history of terrorism and social violence. From the US perspective the terrorist attacks in India have been viewed as domestic concerns. The US regards India as strategically important in South Asia. The US—India ‘123’ nuclear agreement in 2007 was further confirmation of India’s strategic importance to the US. Although it is has not been regarded as a front line state in the War on Terror, India’s rivalry with Pakistan is thought to have distracted Pakistani military and security agencies away from fighting militants along its long, porous border with Afghanistan.

Aid, Civil Society and the State in Kenya

This paper draws upon fieldwork in Kenya carried out on several trips between July 2006 and June 2007. The research is based on a review of primary and secondary sources including government and donor documentation and media reports as well as qualitative interviewing with aid and donor agency staff, government officials, democracy and governance NGOs, humanitarian organisations, human rights activists, Muslim community leaders and journalists. A total of 56 interviews were carried out in Nairobi and Mombasa. Further, a roundtable was organised in Nairobi with donor agency officials, civil society activists and NGO representatives to scrutinise important themes arising from the interviews and to assess the wider context of donor – civil society relations in Kenya.

Government—Civil Society Relations Post-9/11

Since 9/11 government and donor approaches to civil society have become more circumspect. As discussed in Chapter 2, by the turn of the millennium governments, international institutions and development agencies were beginning to adopt a more critical and strategic stance towards civil society, and especially towards advocacy organisations and funded NGOs. Thismore cautious engagement arose from concerns over the accountability, legitimacy, probity of civil society organisations as well as the bureaucratic costs of working with a compendium of small groups. Concurrently, there were concerns over aid effectiveness and donors were devising new ways of channelling aid to achieve the greater expectations of what development should deliver. This involved directing greater support through aid-recipient governments with a resulting de-emphasis on civil society support. Hence, government and donor strategies towards civil society were undergoing considerable changes prior to the emergence of security concerns and suspicions of civil society in the context of the War on Terror.

Theorising the Securitisation of Aid and Effects on Civil Societies

International development assistance has always been a key part of foreign policy. During the Cold War period both the ‘communist’ Soviet Union and the capitalist West used international development assistance to foster allies in Africa, Latin and Central America, and Asia. In the post-9/11 context, too, international development and military aid have been deployed as tools to reward and persuade. The harnessing of international development assistance into the prosecution of the War on Terror has not been limited to increased resource allocations to strategic front-line states such as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It has also required a shift in development priorities, in greater engagement between development and security institutions, the expansion and creation of new programmes promoting security interests, and an explicit ideological linking of development with counter-terrorism.

Civil Society, Security and Aid: Shifting Donor Perspectives

Concerned about the perceived threat to global markets and global security, UN leaders, politicians in Europe and the US have articulated a discourse that links security more firmly with development. Kofi Annan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Bush have all rehearsed the refrain that poverty and terrorism are somehow interrelated. Though it has been increasingly acknowledged that the terrorists involved in the New York, London and Madrid attacks were not typically from impoverished backgrounds, illiterate or educated in madrassas, nevertheless the assumption of some connection between poverty, alienation, exclusion and radicalisation leading to terrorism continues to be made. Bilateral development agencies, international NGOs, some politicians in the South and development activists have in turn capitalised on this refrain to lobby for an increase in aid.

Civil Society, Security and Aid Post-9/11: Afghanistan

Accused of harbouring Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was to become the first target of President Bush’s War on Terror. Within a few months, the Taliban had fallen under the weight of the US military and political war machine. By December 2001 the Bonn Agreement had been signed and agreement reached for the gradual installation of an elected government. The subsequent processes of political stabilisation, reconstruction and development have proceeded hand in hand with the relentless pursuit of the War on Terror, and in particular the dogged hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda supporters.1 The US pursuit of its geopolitical interests through force and the soft touch of democracy and markets has accelerated and intensified the convergence of aid, security and foreign policy goals, operations and institutions. Afghanistan was the first battleground after 9/11 in which the seemingly contradictory goals of the War on Terror and the promotion of liberal democracy and freedom were played out to their full.