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Kenya's March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the country's biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the newly elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralisation in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnam's theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenya's new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of ‘recentralisation’ by the national government, or as one of the capture of sub-national units by ‘local elites’ or ‘notables’. Rather, decentralisation in Kenya has generated a political system with a more robust set of checks and balances, but at the expense of fostering a new set of local controversies that have the potential to exacerbate corruption and fuel local ethnic tensions in some parts of the country.

Following the elections of 2007, there was a significant increase in public expressions of secessionist feeling on the Kenya coast. During 2010 and 2011, one manifestation of this was the emergence of the Mombasa Republic Council (MRC), which demands independence for the coastal region. The language of secessionism is historical, and revisits the vivid political debates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when politics in coastal Kenya revolved successively around two constitutional issues. The first was the possibility that the Ten-Mile Strip, nominally the sovereign territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar, might not become a part of independent Kenya; the second was the 'regionalist' constitution of 1963–4. This article explores the way that people now retell the history of earlier debates, and argues that these retellings suggest both the power and the plasticity of claims to historical knowledge, and that they reveal a profound fault line within 'secessionist' opinion, which separates those who claim political primacy on the basis of autochthony from those who locate their claim to independence in the language of colonial-era treaties. Such divisions are important, because they shape the way that secessionist arguments are framed, and the potential for secessionist politics to undermine the unity of the Kenyan state.

Southern Sudanese politicians of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticized for a rivalrous, divisive politics, which left the south disunited and vulnerable. While acknowledging that these men were a tiny, squabbling group, remote from those they sought to represent, this article suggests that they faced an impossible task. The demand to represent ‘the south’ did not come solely, or even largely, from the people who lived in the southern provinces: southern politics was heavily extraverted, pulled by the interests and prejudices of northern Sudanese, Egyptians, Britons, and others. Like other African nationalists of the time, southern Sudanese politicians struggled to weave together different levels of moral community, from the very local to the imagined nation. Yet they did so in uniquely unfavourable circumstances: subject to constant harassment and occasionally lethal violence, unable to secure political compromise, and without patronage resources. Representing the south gave these men space to talk about the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who lived in Sudan's southern provinces; but it gave them almost no space at all to negotiate a civic culture of southern politics.

Research on Kenya’s 2013 elections has suggested that a “peace narrative” was deliberately promoted by an establishment elite to delegitimize protest and justify the use of excessive force. It has also tended to see the Kenyan case as exceptional and to assume that such a narrative was only possible because of the 2007/2008 post-election violence. We agree that peace campaigns are often particularly intense in the wake of violence and that they can be manipulated to generate a “peaceocracy”, a system in which an emphasis on peace is used to prioritize stability and order to the detriment of democracy. However, by comparing Kenya to Ghana and Uganda, two countries that have had very different experiences of elections and election-related violence, we demonstrate that peace messaging is neither unique to countries that have experienced recent electoral conflict, nor a recent phenomenon. Instead, we highlight the pervasiveness of peace narratives across the sub-continent, which we show is due to a number of factors. These include but are not limited to the way that elections are used to assert and perform state autonomy and an associated ideal of elections as orderly processes; the capacity of multiple actors to instrumentalize the ideal of orderly elections; a popular fear of electoral violence even in countries where it is rare; a growing tendency to individualize responsibility for peace; and the availability of international funding. Taken together, these factors help to explain the rise of peace messaging. At the same time, we argue that the risk that this messaging will foster a “peaceocracy” varies markedly and that the likelihood of incumbent manipulation is greatest in countries with a recent history of civil conflict and where the quality of democracy is already low.

The role of principals, especially in rural schools, where educational outcomes fall below the national average, is significant in implementing changes in the school. The focus of this qualitative study was to explore factors that principals deem most crucial to establishing and maintaining Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). Moreover, elements linked to how principals perceive the practicality of developing and supporting PLCs in rural schools were examined. The researcher conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with principals to determine their perceptions about attributes most important in establishing PLCs. Seven principals with a minimum number of 3 years in the position were included in the study. Findings indicated that buy-in from teachers and mutual trusts were substantial factors influencing the leadership component of PLCs in rural schools. As the researchers concluded, principals must intentionally facilitate connecting the PLC framework using professional development to affect organizational change and subsequently impact campus learning.

The campaign against the Shifta separatists of northern Kenya involved so much extra-legal violence that an extraordinary law was passed indemnifying police, soldiers, and administrators against responsibility for their actions-in direct imitation of the 1955 double amnesty which had offered similar protection to those involved in the campaign against Mau Mau.11 The decade after independence was punctuated by a series of assassinations; the murders of Pio Gama Pinto in 1965, Tom Mboya in 1969 and J.M. Kariuki in 1975, have never been fully explained, but it was widely assumed that all were linked to senior figures in the government.12 The use of extra-legal violence, and the derogation of violence to others, was very much a feature of Kenya in the 1960s and 1970s. [...]elections also offered a way to manage and obscure what Abrams calls the \"actual disunity of political power,\" which is concealed by the idea of the state.102 And so they were ultimately successful in drawing population and civil service into an enactment of the imagined distinction between state and society, which authorized certain forms of coercion and violence while delegitimizing others-and maintained the political order.