Tuesday 17 March 2026 4:30pm to 6:00pm
S1, ARB
About
This paper addresses how during Kenya’s era of intense political repression spanning the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the government of Daniel arap Moi came to routinize juridical and physical violence as key modalities of statecraft in its efforts to quell opposition. Conflicting desires to cultivate rule of law legitimacy and to crush dissent characterized the regime’s approach to governance during this period. At the same time, the Kenya case offers important insights into a significant, but much less-studied, phenomenon: legal mobilization against authoritarianism. Activist lawyers and legal associations in Kenya drew upon an array of tools, strategies, and connections to resist Moi’s autocratic legalism. Examining their tactics enables us to consider how “lawfare” need not be considered exclusively the purview of repressive regimes but rather can take in legally-based resistance to authoritarianism.
Biography
Katherine Luongo is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya: 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-author, with Matthew Carotenuto, of Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging (Ohio University Press, 2016). Her most recent monograph, African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs (Routledge, 2023), investigates witchcraft-driven violence across Africa from the standpoints of law, anthropology, migration, and human rights studies. Her newest book project, “Law Without Justice: A History of Human Rights in Postcolonial Kenya,” examines the development of the human rights movement led by activist lawyers and legal associations during Kenya’s period of intense political repression that spanned the late 1960s to the early 1990s. She also serves as deputy editor of African Studies Review. At present, she holds a Smuts Visiting Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies at Cambridge.