Terrorists, Geopolitics and Kenya’s Proposed Border Wall with Somalia

Abstract

Addressing border security appears to be a plausible approach for states that suffer from terrorism. Kenya's border wall is to keep terrorists out of Kenya. Utilizing a comparative approach, this paper explores the efficacy of border walls, particularly Kenya's wall with Somalia. Findings show that walls rarely accomplish stated goals and have unintended consequences. In Kenya's case, it may reignite border disputes and separate communities. The success of Kenya's border wall is low given the high levels of corruption and the fact that walls have been demonstrated to only be as good as the people who guard them.H einous acts call for desperate countermeasures. The killing in cold blood on April 2, 2015 of 147 students at Garissa University in Kenya, by a handful of terrorists affiliated with the al-Shabaab terrorist group, has led Kenyan authorities to resort to building a wall along its border with Somalia in an effort to stem future attacks. The decision to construct a security wall occurred against a backdrop of the public rage and anguish felt in Kenya following the attack and compounded by repeated al-Shabaab attacks in the country since 2008. Kenyan authorities' fixation with ostensibly penning in al-Shabaab terrorists and keeping them out of Kenya dominated discourse about the suitability of a border wall. Al-Shabaab's leaders and most of its terrorist training camps are based in Somalia. The terrorists who conducted the attacks at Garissa University came from Somalia and ostensibly acted under the direction of al-Shabaab leadership.When Kenya announced it was building a wall, questions were immediately raised regarding the effectiveness of such an expensive venture. However, the debate about constructing the border barrier did not consider or entertain key questions including the likely geopolitical repercussions such as migration in the region, separating communities and clans that have co-existed and depended on each other for hundreds of years and long-simmering border disputes with Kenya's neighbours, some of which have periodically fed Somali irredentism. This paper utilizes international security theories and a comparative political science approach in analysing the efficacy of Kenya's proposed border wall with Somalia as a strategy for containing al-Shabaab and preventing future terrorist attacks in the country. Existing evidence suggests that the proposed wall, if completed, will exacerbate an already volatile situation by reigniting border disputes not only between Somalia and Kenya; but could also provide precedent for other states in the region to raise claims over borders that were drawn by colonial powers. The proposed border also will artificially separate communities and clans who live on either side of the border and negatively affect existing and legitimate social, cultural, economic and political cross-border exchanges. Lastly, this paper argues that the chances of success of the JTR, Volume 7, Issue 2-May 2016 Kenya/Somalia border wall (keeping out terrorists) are miniscule, given the h...

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