Kenya was already on the precipice long before the disputed 27 December 2007 election, which sparked the cataclysmic post-election violence that brought one of Africa's most promising democracies to the brink of state failure. This contribution traces the 2008 crisis back to the deeply ingrained legacy of instrumentalisation of ethnicity and informalisation of viol...

The emergence of intra-state wars based on identity requires a reconfiguring of existing conflict resolution mechanisms. The article recognises the limitations of liberal peace models originally configured to deal with inter-state conflicts, but increasingly applied to inter-ethnic conflicts with limited success and often disastrous effects. The article argues for ...