Building a culture of resistance: securitising and de-securitising Eastleigh during the Kenyan government’s Operation Usalama Watch

This paper focuses on Operation Usalama Watch, a counter-terrorism crackdown that was conducted in Eastleigh, the predominately Kenyan-Somali neighbourhood of Nairobi, in April 2014. Using the response to the operation as a case study, it seeks to build on criticisms of the Copenhagen School by arguing that the notion of the ‘speech act’ is limiting when considering alternative media through which subtle forms of dissent are channelled and counter-narratives are expressed. Moreover, it argues that conventional securitisation theory has predominately focused on discursive attempts to construct rather than deconstruct security threats. By drawing together, criticisms of securitisation theory, the scholarship on subaltern studies and the literature on youth politics in Africa, the political agency and forms of resistance used by young people that do not resort to overt contestation through speech become apparent. This paper argues that during the operation, young people in Eastleigh used novel and often informal mediums to speak back to power, challenge convention and ultimately contribute to a process of de-securitisation by creating a culture of resistance.