CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Aungo, Justus Bw'Onderi |
|---|---|
| Title | Performance and Dynamics of Public Protest in Kenya |
| Summary | What is the motivation and meaning of protest in Kenya? Through this question, I sought to explore through selected testimonies and archival data, what makes people participate in the protest in Kenya, and what such protests means to different people in the country. Observing that changes have occurred in the way the protest events are enacted, from violent to peaceful and ‘decent’, I also explored the possible explanations of such changes within the context of rationality, dramatization and personalization of the politics of contention. From this, I suggest that the rationality of the emerging and shifting State class dominates and manipulates the nature and construct of the protest movement in Kenya as it controls and negotiates within itself, the control of the State structures for the accumulation, mobilization and distribution of socio-economic resources and socio-political reproduction. To that end, public protest has become dramatized to camouflage its composition and its class manipulation as well as legitimate itself as a decent negotiation strategy within the state class. There are shifts from the radical violence-prone protest of the early 90s to intra-state-class negotiated and legitimate protests which serve as opportunities for campaigns and power contestation within the political elite. Though the study finds that the resource mobilization theory offers appropriate conceptual tools for studying the Kenyan protest movements, it suggests, the approach be conceptually contextualized through the state-class reading of African politics in order to enable it account for the ‘socio-cultural performative’ of African protest and claim-making which are inherently aimed at personalized acquisition of state power. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Kowalski, Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/aungo_justus.pdf |
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