Enacting the state through security assemblages: Materiality, technology and political subjectification in Nairobi

After the terror attack at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in September 2013, the Kenyan security sector experienced an increased demand for security services. Private security personnel, police, residents and various objects and technologies were mobilized in the securitization of Nairobi’s commercial and residential spaces. These public-private collaborations, also observable elsewhere in the world, continue to challenge vested notions about the state holding a monopoly over the provision of security. Arguing that the state is enacted through socio-material security practices, the dissertation draws attention to processes of political subjectification that define who is considered dangerous or, alternatively, in need of protection. The work in this dissertation puts in conversation political anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). In political anthropology scholars, rather than approaching the state as a stable and homogeneous entity, tend to study the state by ethnographically attending to the everyday practices involved in its formation and their effects. In STS scholars have directed a longstanding attention to object and technology and their role in mediating social processes. In Nairobi as elsewhere, contemporary security practices rely on various objects and technological devices, such as barbed wire, smart cameras or nightsticks, which help to routinize the differentiation of threats from non-threats. They contribute to identifying people “like us” or “dangerous others”, a process that I analyze as one way through which the state is enacted. In Nairobi, such othering becomes empirically visible in the discrimination of Muslims, Somalis and Somali-Kenyans, domestic workers, and young African men living in poor urban settlements