On 27 December, 2007, Kenyan citizens took to the polls for the fourth time since multiparty democracy was introduced in 1992. The sentiment was that democracy was finally coming of age in this East African country. For many, these elections represented a turn in the country’s democratic process that would bring change in the areas of justice, food, shelter, education and employment to all – as these were the main campaign promises. Instead, at the conclusion of the voting and at the beginning of the tallying process, the electorate erupted violently at the suspicion and eventual reporting of the process being rigged. One of the main subjects discussed in this study includes the argument that Kenya is ailing from a lack of responsible political leadership. The breed of Kenyan politicians that have been experienced in the country since it gained its independence from British colonialists in 1963, have plundered its resources – material and human – to the brink of war. It is no longer a valid argument that Africa, just because of a history of governments looting and plundering the vast resources that belong to the world’s poorest of the poor, in particular Kenya produces bad leaders. The second topic of discussion in this study questions the role of ethnic mobilisation during the elections. It is well documented by authors such as Cowen and Kanyinga (in Cowen and Laakso (eds.) 2002: 128-171) that ethnicity in Kenya, under the machinations of irresponsible political leaders, has in the past played a critical part in rallying one political party against another. The 2007 General Election was no different. The contested presidential election results were announced on 30 December, 2007, declaring another term of office for the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki. Since that announcement, thousands of people were reported dead while hundreds of thousands were considered displaced. The chaos was followed by a long mediation process kicked off with the AU chairman, John Kufuor, president of Ghana, hosting a number of talks between the two parties. However, this did not bear much fruit as the two conflicting parties could not agree on the main issue of the creation of a position of Prime Minister for Raila Odinga to 7 fill. This was then followed by a more successful mediation process hosted by the Elders1 including former United Nations (UN) secretary general, Kofi Annan, Graça Maçhel and Benjamin Mkapa, as indicated by The Daily Nation newspapers throughout the month of January 2008. It is with this background that the study will now turn to the discussion about the context of the research, its objectives, rationale, motivation and the research design

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of International Relations in the Faculty of Humanities, Department of International Relations / The electoral process in African conflict ridden societies has largely been synonymous with violence since the inauguration of democratic experiments in the cold war aftermath. The transition to democracy including the role of elections in the process of building democracy has been confronted with challenges and the fate of these nations remained vulnerable. As a remedy to these challenges, external and internal forces have continually encouraged the leaders of the newly multiparty states to test their political legitimacy through inviting the Internatitonal election monitors. As a consequence, international election observation has become widely accepted around the world and is assumed to play an important role in the electoral processes. The presence of these agencies is believed to instil confidence in the domestic people and deter electoral fraud. The Kenyan case shall assess the election trends in 2007-2013 and the performance of election monitors within the international efforts to promote democracy in Africa. The issues they put across, their reports, criticisms and what they prescribed, will be useful in assessing their performance and measuring their impact on democratic governance in Kenya. / XL2018

In the recent years, majority of African countries have been faced by conflicts during election periods. Some of the electoral related conflicts escalated into violence, and they have been transformed or managed. While other electoral related conflicts have just been prevented during the election periods but remain latent conflicts that would escalate triggered by future elections. This study focuses specifically on electoral conflicts in Kenya and its conflict management perspective from 2002-2013. To transform and manage the conflict, peacebuilding initiatives have been integrated in the study. The prime actors in Kenya electoral conflict includes the; the ruling party coalition, the leading opposition coalition and ethnic groupings affiliated to the ruling party and opposition. Other peripheral actors include: the Independent, Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC), the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the judiciary. Triangulation (the combination of two or more methods of collecting and analysing data) has been adopted both in data collection and analysis. Focus group interviews, selected individual interviews, and literature reviews were used to collect data, while research findings were analysed systematically using the constructivist grounded theory. Moreover, the liberal peace theory, Institutionalisation before Liberalisation (IBL) and findings from other researchers like (Elder, Stigant and Claes 2014:1-20), and the Afrobarometer research findings (Kivuva 2015) have been used to authenticate the research findings. Research findings indicates that claims of election rigging, numerous institutional failures, negative ethnicity and economic disparity, among other factors heighten the fear and anxiety that escalates during elections. Towards achieving peacebuilding and sustainable peace, the following reforms were undertaken: constitutional changes and reviews, electoral body reform, judicial reform, pursuit of transitional justice, extensive range of local initiatives reforms and police reforms. However, findings in the study also reveal that despite the latter reforms, peacebuilding measures have been short-term, temporal, and not fully successful, leaving behind a latent conflict that could be triggered again with future electoral conflicts. Besides that, negotiation, dialogue and mediation played a role in restoring trust and confidence in the democratic structures after escalated elections. We also recommend that multi-ethnic composition for electoral coalitions should also be adopted as a means to mitigate ethnic triggered conflicts.

Critically examines the role of electoral systems in the democratisation process and conflict management in divided societies such as Kenya and Rwanda. Analyses the power sharing arrangement institutionalized in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide in order to demonstrate the potential to mitigate issues of ethnic. Also explores the anomalous results caused by the current electoral system in Kenya (First Past The Post) in its process of democratization and then find out which is the most suitable electoral system which encourage co-operation and inclusiveness and discourage conflict and exclusiveness. minority representation / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Atangcho N Akonumbo, Faculté de Sciences Sociales et de Gestion, Université Catholique D’Afrique, Centrale Yaounde Cameroun. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union has encouraged democratisation in most parts of Africa. At the same time, Western donors' attitudes towards r~cipients of foreign aid have changed. This has resulted in a new practice, which attempts to force Third World states to move toward liberal democracy by conditioning lending on the holding of mUlti-party elections. In Africa this has resulted to the holding of multi-party elections. This study attempts to examine donor conditionalities and democratisation in Kenya by examining the results of 1992 and 1997 multi-party elections. Kenya attained independence from the British and ushered in a multi-party democracy in 1963. Since then, the country has undergone a full circle of political development, starting with a multi-party democracy at independence, through a one party dictatorship between 1982 and 1992 and back to a multi-party democracy in 1993. The need to satisfy foreign donors forced the leadership to amend Section 2(A) of Kenya' s constitution that had legalised single-party rule in 1982 thus allowing plural politics. The externally pressured transition to multi-party democracy though has resulted in increased corruption, state-sponsored ethnic violence, continued political authoritarianism and disastrous economic mismanagement of what was once considered a model for the continent. This study urges that Western donors should focus less on elections and more on the fostering of democratic institutions through breaking patterns of neo-patrimonial rule that have inforn1ed and continue to inform politics in Kenya. Political reforms have been resisted by the incumbency in the fear tha! they may curtail the power of the political leadership whose main objective has been to cling to power.

Competitive national elections can play a significant role in the consolidation process of developing and established democracies alike. Nevertheless, if not handled adequately, they have the potential to bring long-existing, existential conflict lines to the surface. This electoral conflict, becoming manifest in election violence, has the potential to shy people off from voting and negatively affect their attitude towards elections and democracy in general. The present study examined the ways in which violent electoral conflict affected the political participation and the personal attitudes towards democracy of ordinary Kenyan citizens. Kenya has experienced violent electoral conflict repeatedly since the re-introduction of competitive elections in 1992 and became one of its prime examples due to the devastating 2008 post-election clashes. In order to answer the research questions, 32 semi-structured interviews with 34 victims of electoral violence coming from four main ‘hotspot areas’ of the 2008 post-election violence as well as four expert interviews were conducted. The study finds that the experience of violent electoral conflict led to diametrically opposed reactions in the behaviour of political participation among respondents. About two-thirds of them indicated a change in their behaviour of political participation. With 33% of the respondents found to be “participating more”, this group even outnumbers its “participating less” counterpart (30%). This finding is rather surprising as the experience of electoral violence is usually associated with the tendency to shy off from political participation, not only in Kenya. Based on their attitudinal dispositions towards democracy in general and towards democracy in Kenya more specifically, as well as towards Kenyan elections, politics and politicians, a fourfold typology of Kenyan citizens was developed from the sample. It includes: the voting citizen, the resigned citizen, the passive citizen, and the active citizen. The voting citizen with no further interest in politics or political participation was found to be the most prevalent type of citizen in the sample. Attention needs to be taken towards the resigned citizen, which could, in case of further violent electoral conflict and the continuing marginalization of specific ethnic groups, cause a threat to the stabilization process of Kenya’s democracy. Contributions of this study were in designing a destination identity framework as well as in discovering the identity of the city of Nelson Mandela Bay. Directions for future studies include the possibility to conduct a qualitative study on place identity so as to obtain a more nuanced understanding of sub-identities in the city.

A Research Report submitted at the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master Arts in International Relations Johannesburg, 2019 / Existing frameworks that seek to respond to the challenge of preventing and managing electoral violence often omit technology as a relevant factor. Yet there is resounding proof that technology has wielded a sizeable amount of influence in shaping voter behaviour and perceptions, mobilising support, lobbying and ultimately influencing electoral outcomes. The utilisation of technology is evidenced by many examples; such as the use of biometrics to register and identify voters, the establishment of situation rooms and drones that collect data in real time, campaigns messages that are sent via text messages, video footage, radio, internet and bots that are used to collect and transmit information. The main problem that this study seeks to interrogate is the bi-directional outcomes generated by the use of ICTs in elections. There are cases where ICTs have been deployed to ferment violence, whilst ICTs have also proven to be useful in preventing electoral violence. Therefore, there is a need for research that assesses how ICTs can be better harnessed as a tool for the prevention and reduction of electoral violence in Africa. Notably, by exploring the use of ICTs by actors in Kenya’s 2007, 2013 and 2017 elections, the study posits that collaboration and responsible use are key in the prevention of electoral violence. Moreover, the study highlights that the use of new ICTs in elections is important in the growing discourse about defining the parameters of electoral integrity. / NG (2020)

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Witwatersrand, South Africa Wits School of Governance, 2017 / This research addresses three questions: how Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) following the post-election violence of 2007/2008 in Kenya are recreating their community resilience capacities; how the Kenyan government and non-state interventions are influencing the victims’ livelihood strategies towards their reconstruction and recovery process and how social support and social capital has accelerated their reconstruction and recovery process. It proposes a post-conflict reconstruction and recovery approach based on the research findings. The research adopted Qualitative research methodology and primary data were collected from the month of January, 2015 continuously and concurrently with data analysis. The key findings were that ownership of land is perceived and identified as a milestone in the process of post-conflict reconstruction and recovery, an avenue for community resilience. The main means of livelihood for IDPs are casual labour and other menial jobs. The Kenyan government has made an effort towards resettlement of IDPs although this is ad hoc and ineffective due to lack of experience and a specific framework for any major resettlement. NGOs abandoned the reconstruction and recovery projects as soon as the humanitarian crisis ended. But the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had reconstruction and recovery projects which ended in 2011. In displacement, IDPs lost their original support system, but developed new emergent norms to support each other. Integration of IDPs is a better option in the reconstruction and recovery process compared to the government farm resettlement approach. The key recommendations are that government should evaluate the economic loss of every integrated IDP and those resettled in government procured farms should be provided with legal ownership documents. There should be an urgent re-profiling of IDPs in camps and use of UN Guiding Principles on IDPs to re-integrate them into society. The findings of this research bring to light new knowledge on the theory of social capital: victims of displacement develop new emergent norms, values and culture to support each other, which eventually creates a new society/community. Key Words: Post-conflict reconstruction and recovery; integrated IDPs; government resettled IDPs; camp-based IDPs; social capital: social support; livelihood strategies. / E.R. 2019

No description available.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Africa has made tremendous progress over the past decades in its transition to democratic regimes. When evaluating the leverage such an enormous change has, and the haste Africa was in when making this change, the continent has been able to achieve a considerable amount of revision in their regimes. One fundamental aspect of a democracy is competitive Presidential elections. This has however shown to be a problem in Africa as many cases of violent elections have been reported on, with Nigeria’s 2011 elections being the latest example. The focus of this thesis is on the causal factors behind electoral violence in African democracies. More specifically, a comparative analysis of Kenya’s 2007 Elections and Zimbabwe’s 2008 elections is presented. The five possible causal factors under analysis are 1) free and fair elections, 2) international assistance, 3) political/electoral systems and 4) socio-economic factors and 5) ethnicity. Additionally, background information on the history of Kenya and Zimbabwe is presented. The research is conducted around the framework of one of the foremost African scholars in the field, Gilbert Khadiagala. His typology suggests two angles ‘In the first order of causes, electoral violence is the outcome of events and circumstances that emanate from broader political conflicts, particularly in societies that are beset by ethnic, communal and sectarian fissures. In the second category, electoral violence is a consequence of imperfect electoral rules; imperfections that allow some parties to manipulate elections through electoral fraud, vote buying, and rigging’ (Khadiagala, 2010:17). Next to this a discussion on Khadiagala’s fourth wave of democracy is analysed which proves of major importance for Kenya and Zimbabwe to prevent election violence. Not only because of the fact that the contemporary form of their democracies clearly show major flaws, but also because a democracy has proved to encourage socio-economic development. Firstly, the findings suggest that the people are fed up with stolen elections and they are demanding the free and fair conduct of elections. The use of violence is the means to express this ‘demand’. Furthermore, in both Kenya and Zimbabwe, the land occupation of colonizers caused the start of deep social cleavages and ethnic tensions. In Kenya it is concluded that the cause of violence was not purely the flawed election process, this was merely a trigger for underlying ethnic tensions. In Zimbabwe in turn, the violence was mainly sparked by President Mugabe’s government who used extreme means to gain votes. The system was highly manipulated and due to weak institutions and electoral rules, President Mugabe was able to rig the elections. The role of international assistance is discussed and proves to be of little influence towards election violence. In the case of Zimbabwe, no international observers were invited, in the case of Kenya, international observers were invited and present. In both cases violence broke out. The establishment of a stronger socio-economic society proves vital for the development of a democracy. The connection between ethnic, social and economic differences to the electoral system recognizes that further deepening and strengthening of the democratic institutions needs to become a reality in order to conduct more peaceful elections. The elections are far from free and fair and as a result of weak democratic institutions the possibility of rigging is created. With the underlying ethnic tensions and broader political cleavages, Kenya and Zimbabwe proved prone to violence. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Wanneer daar in ag geneem word dat Afrika onder moeilike omstandighede en in ‘n baie kort tydperk, beweeg het van meerderheid autokratiese state na demokrasieë, is dit regverdig om te argumenteer dat Afrika ‘n kenmerkende vordering gemaak het in die laaste dekades om ‘n demokratiese samenleving te berwerkstellig. Helaas, n fundamentele aspek van n demokrasie is die beoefening van gereelde en kompeterend verkiesings. Oor die jare is daar bewys dat verkiesings n problematiese aspek van demokrasie is in meeste Afrika state, meerderheid van verkiesings in Afrika is geneig om uit te loop in konflik en geweld. Dus is die fokus van die studie op die faktore wat bydra tot konflik gedurende n verkiesings tydperk in jong Afrika demokrasieë. Meer spesifiek sal daar n vergelykende studie gedoen word van die 2007 verkiesing in Kenia en die 2008 verkiesing in Zimbabwe. Die vyf faktore wat bydra tot konflik gedurende verkiesings is : 1) vry en regverdige verkiesings, 2) internasionale hulpvelening, 3) politiese en verkiesingsstelsels, 4) sosio-ekonomiese faktore, 5) etnisiteit, word elk bespreek. Ook word die agtergrond van beide die verkiesings in Zimbabwe en Kenia bespreek. Die teoretiese aspekte van die studie is gebaseer op die werk van Gilbert Khadiagala, n hoogs ge-respekteerde kenner op die gebied. Sy teorie veronderstel dat konflik plaasvind as gevolg van politiek konflikte en etniese verskille. Tweedens, beweer hy dat verkiesingskonflik n produk is van foutiewe verkiesingsstelsels, veral waar een groep die ander groep kan manipuleer en waar bedrog moontlik is. Langs dit is 'n bespreking oor Khadiagala se vierde golf van demokrasie ontleed en bewys dit van groot belang vir Kenia en Zimbabwe om verkiesings geweld te voorkom. Nie net as gevolg van die feit dat die demokrasieë duidelik groot foute toon nie, maar ook en meer belangrik, omdat 'n demokrasie sosio-ekonomiese ontwikkeling aanmoedig. Daar word gevind dat meeste mense eenvoudig keelvol is met ‘gesteelde’ verkiesings en dat hulle begin aandring op vry en regverdige verkiesings en konflik en geweld is die enigste manier om hulle wense te verwesenlik. Ook, in beide Kenia en Zimbabwe het kolonialiseerders n groot skeuring veroorsaak tussen verskillende etniese groepe in beide lande, wat vandag voordurende etniese spanning veroorsaak. In Kenia blyk dit dat dit die etniese verskille was wat gelei het tot die verkiesingsgeweld in 2007 eerder as foutiewe verkiesingsstelsels. In Zimbabwe was dit verkiesingskorrupsie en President Robert Mugabe se oneerlike wyse van stemme werf wat gelei het tot konflik. Dit is aangetoon dat die aanwesigheid van internationale hulp min invloed het op verkiesings geweld. In die geval van Zimbabwe, is daar geen internasionale waarnemers genooi nie en in die geval van Kenia, is daar wel internasionale waarnemers is genooi en was hulle daadwerklik aanwesig. In beide gevalle het geweld uitgebreek. Daar word gevind dat ‘n sterke sosio-ekonomiese sameleving belangrik is vir demokratiese ontwikkling van ‘n land. Verder word daar geargumenteer dat sterk en onafhanklik politieke en demokratiese instansies bevorder moet word ten einde meer vreedsame verkiesings te hou. Tans in Afrika is verkiesings ver van vry en regverdig, gesamentlik met etniese spanning kan dit n plofbare situasie veroorsaak soos bewys in Kenia en Zimbabwe.