Corruptus interruptus: the limits of transactional imaginaries in Moi's Kenya

Abstract

This article attempts to unsettle treatments of sovereignty that assume an intrinsic relationship between violence and the law even while critiquing the capacity of the law to ground social order through violence. In such discussions, the police become the embodiment of the force of law without content, especially in totalitarian contexts. In contrast, this article explores other conceptions of the police and by extension, sovereignty, at work in Kenya through an examination of police/citizen interactions at a marked political moment - the end of the 24-year rule of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 2002. Through a particular example of the complicated conviviality that pervades state/society relations in many patrimonial political contexts - in this case between a policeman, a bus driver, and the bus diver's wife - I attempt to reframe normative conceptions about the police and of enforcement in the context of Kenya's failing patrimonial economy of circulation and capture in the...