No abstract

Colonial rule in Kenya witnessed the emergence of a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape. With all capacity resided in a strong prefectural provincial administration, political parties remained underdeveloped. The co-option of sympathetic African elites during the colonial twilight into the bureaucracy, the legislature and the private property-based economy meant that the allies of colonialism and representatives of transnational capital were able to reap the benefits of independence. In the late colonial period these elites not only attained the means of production, they also assumed the political and institutional capacity to reproduce their dominance. The post-colonial state must therefore be seen as a representation of the interests protected and promoted during the latter years of colonial rule. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the post-colonial state represented a ‘pact-of-domination’ between transnational capital, the elite and the executive. The ability of this coalition to reproduce itself over time lay in its capacity to demobilise popular forces, especially those elements of the nationalist movement that questioned both the social and economic cleavages of the post-colonial state. Whilst Kenya may have experienced changes to both the executive and legislature, the structure of the state itself has demonstrated remarkable continuity.

No abstract

The United States eventually got it right in Iraq, according to many observers and policy makers: counterinsurgency worked, and the lessons can be exported to Afghanistan and beyond. In response to the increasing intensity and range of attacks by Taliban forces in Afghanistan, in 2009 the U.S. sent in more troops and attempted to replicate the tactics that "worked" in Iraq: "clear, hold, and build," the effort to combine violence only against insurgents with the building of local civilian institutions. Yet the setting for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan differed dramatically from that in Iraq, which led to debate among politicians and experts about the prospects of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and its likely costs in "blood and treasure."To persuade policy makers to embrace counterinsurgency over more conventional alternatives in Iraq and then Afghanistan, advocates had sought to silence skepticism based on the fear that the Vietnam "quagmire" would recur. Deflecting comparison with Vietnam, these advocates argued that the dreaded quagmire could be sidestepped and pointed instead to successful counterinsurgency campaigns by European colonial powers and by the U.S. in various settings, including in El Salvador. Efforts to defeat insurgencies, the advocates of counterinsurgency claim, should seek to win the "hearts and minds" of civilians by engaging in violence only against insurgents, delivering public services (particularly security) to civilians, and carrying out needed reforms to government policy to sustain civilian loyalty and address grievances exploited by insurgents.But the very terms hearts and minds and quagmire suggest how hard it is to set Vietnam aside. The articles that follow provide some of the reasons why. In this special section, the authors reexamine three key cases often analyzed by advocates of the