Weapons of mass destruction: Land, ethnicity and the 2007 elections in Kenya

The Autocratic Trust Bias: Politically Sensitive Survey Items and Self-Censorship

“…Figure 9 highlights two cases where we observe large changes over time in the propensity to indicate "A lot" of trust in the country's president when the respondent suspects government sponsorship. In Kenya there was no significant e↵ect of believing that the government had sent the enumerator on respondents propensity to indicate high trust in the country's president in 2003 and 2005. In the aftermath of the 2007-08 Kenyan crisis, which saw some 1300 people dead and 600 000 people displaced following politically motivated (Kagwanja and Southall, 2009;Rutten and Owuor, 2009), and allegedly state sponsored violence (HRW, 2008), respondents where statistically significantly and substantively (1.86 times) more likely to indicate that they trusted president Kibaki "A lot" when they believed that the survey was not independent 4 . Breaking citizens' trust seams to be associated with higher levels of reported trust from the very same.…”

An overview of Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe: editorial introduction

“…If its two decades longer resettlement experience is any clue to the future of Zimbabwe, there is likely to be a continued and powerful thrust by such interests, but it is also likely to be contested by more democratic forces, especially at the local level. So the eventual outcome may not be the same as in Kenya, not only in the amount of elite grabbing, but also as regards the resulting agrarian structures (Kanyinga 2009, Rutten andOwuor 2009). One tendency in that country has been for many large landowners to settle for informal renting out of land to smallholder tenants rather than persist in being capitalist farmers.…”

A Lexico-Pragmatic Interpretation of Peace in the 2013 Kenyan Presidential Campaign Speeches Regarding Conflict Management

“…The duo capitalized on their common predicament to call for peaceful election at the same time to prove to the ICC that they were innocent (Jenkins, [9]). It is also in Tarakwa where peace initiatives were first launched to reconcile members of the rival Kalenjin and Kikuyu speech communities (Rutten & Owuor, [18]). The reviewed studies, have highlighted the role of certain lexical choices made by political elites, religious groups and the media in fomenting or mitigating election-related conflict in different parts of Kenya.…”

“…On the flip side, the notion of outsiders had been reinforced through lexical choices aimed at manipulating people to perpetrate atrocities. Apparently, the insiders outsiders nexus is fore grounded by competition for power, land and other resources all of which have paved way for ethno-political conflict ingrained in the association of the presidency with the gains to his ethnic constituents (Rutten &Owuor, [18]). As Cho, et.…”

“…al., [17] observe, the presidency will remain the ultimate political prize Kenya will pay. This prize has pitted one community against the other in informal urban establishments such as Kibera, Huruma and Mathare in Nairobi, and upcountry in Mombasa, Molo, Naivasha, Uasin Gishu (Tarakwa) and Nyamira (Njogu,[14]; Rutten & Owuor, [18]). …”