Islam, Politics, and Violence on the Kenya Coast

In June 2014, the Kenyan coastal town of Mpeketoni was the target of a brutal and prolonged terrorist attack, in which dozens of civilians were murdered. In the aftermath of the attack, there were apparently widely differing analyses of its nature and purpose. After a delay, the Somali-basedal Shabaab movement claimed responsibility. However, the government of Kenya insisted that it had actually been the result of ‘local politics’ – thought it was not clear whether that referred to politics on this part of the coast, or to the tense national politics of confrontation between the ruling Jubilee coalition and the opposition CORD. The ambiguities of this moment of violence provide a revealing window on the complex relationships between developments in Islam at the coast and in Kenya more widely, the coast’s place in wider movements of political Islam, and patterns of secular grievance and political ambition which also drive violence. This paper will argue that the intersection of multiple factors makes the Kenya coast particularly volatile. The weakness of the Kenyan state has provided a favourable environment for acts of terror; equally importantly, Kenya’s national politics have normalized and vulgarized violence