In the course of my fieldwork between 2010 and 2013, I was introduced to and met with hundreds of women whose experiences form the basis of this book. I am indebted to Judith Omuony in Kibera, Nairobi, and Mama Josephine Owiti at St. Stephen’s Cathedral Kisumu, through whose community-organizing networks I met many of the women who so generously shared their life stories with me. The...

The prevalence of gendered and sexualized forms of violence against women observed in the context of Kenya’s democratic politics has far-reaching implications for the country’s democratization as a whole. First, for women as political actors, these forms of violence have militated against women’s...

Lenin famously observed that it was “natural for a liberal to talk generally about ‘democracy’ [but] a Marxist will never forget to pose the...

Kenyan women were involved in various actions, protests, and forms of resistanceWomen’s modes of resistance have been theorized within African feminist scholarship that sheds...

Kenya’s transition to multiparty politics in the early 1990s is grounded in the political liberalization that accompanied neoliberal restructuring from the late 1980s across most of Africa. As individualist political claims crystallized...

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a state-centric view dominated studies of politics in Africa. This approach emphasized the state as the main variable in the political process in Africa. The approach, however, glossed over the significance of societal...

For feminist scholars thinking through the question of democratization after colonialism and within the neoliberalizing state, concern is likely to focus on issues such as the role played by the state as an arbiter of gendered struggles, women’s access to power, and struggles over scarce resources.See House-Midamba,...

This book has been about a central contradiction in the liberal democratic form of politics: that the opening up of democratic spaces does not seem to have stabilized postcolonial societies, nor minimized violence attached to political competitions. Rather, the risk of violence attached to political contestations—in particular, elections—seems to have been exacerbated for certain...

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Series Editors Besi Brillian Muhonja (James Madison University) and Babacar M’Baye (Kent State University)