at Google ScholarTitle data
Lang, Britta ; Sakdapolrak, Patrick:
Violent place-making : How Kenya's post-election violence transforms a workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha.
In: Political Geography.
Vol. 45
(2015)
.
- pp. 67-78.
ISSN 0962-6298
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.09.005
Abstract in another language
Violent events significantly influence the identity of places. Post-conflict areas evoke specific meanings
and emotions, and the narratives of violent events have profound effects on the individual and collective
interpretations of the venues of violence. This paper addresses the interdependent relationship between
violence and place, considering the structural and multi-scalar conditions of a relational and discursive
making of places. By linking them with an empirically grounded analysis of the materialisation of
violence, we follow Gearóid Ó Tuathail's (2010) call for a more grounded study of place-specific causes
for violent conflict. We focus on an empirical example e the post-election violence in Kenya 2007/08 e
and look into one of its venues, a poor and heterogeneous workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha in
Kenya's Rift Valley. Considering the specific socio-political setting in Kenya, we first examine the factors
that explain why the violence broke out at that place in particular. We combine an exploration of the
structural conditions that determined the violence, and which still regulate social life at present, with a
presentation of the individual accounts of people directly or indirectly involved in the violence in Naivasha.
We then investigate how the experience of violence has influenced the imaginations of the place,
and whether these localised imprints of violence in Naivasha continue to regulate social and spatial (re)
organisation after the events themselves. The study reveals that politically instigated societal divides
continue to exist, and that memories of the violence induce intensified processes of segregation in the
surveyed settlement during times of political uncertainty.
Further data
| Item Type: | Article in a journal |
|---|---|
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Keywords: | Post-conflict Kenya; Violence; Territorialisation; Imaginative geographies; Place; Empirical fieldwork |
| Institutions of the University: | Faculties > Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences Faculties > Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences > Department of Earth Sciences Faculties > Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences > Department of Earth Sciences > Chair Social and Population Geography Faculties |
| Result of work at the UBT: | No |
| DDC Subjects: | 300 Social sciences 900 History and geography |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Oct 2017 06:52 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Sep 2022 11:15 |
| URI: | https://eref.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/40073 |