‘Killing a mosquito with a hammer’: Al-Shabaab violence and state security responses in Kenya

Insurgent margins external stresses security

The growing prominence of networked, transnational forms of violence and militancy, particularly across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, has raised the profile of the margins as areas contributing to larger situations of instability. Viewed through the lens of state security, and seen from the perspective of the state, networked transnational violence happening at the margins represents a potential source of instability affecting whole states and regions. Viewed from the margins, however, this violence may appear very different, as something reflecting a longitudinal dynamic of state–society relations, enmeshed in local politics and society, and inseparable from earlier experiences of violence and legacies of conflict. Seen from the perspective of vernacular understandings of security at the margins, recent violence is less a new phenomenon than it is the continuation of long-standing situations of violent insecurity.