Appeasing the Land: Local Peace Committees and the Legitimation of Traditional Peacemaking in Kenya1

Abstract

In the last decade, the Kenyan state, reacting mainly to the 2007/2008 post-election
violence and cases of intergroup conflicts, created local peace committees and conferred
on them the rights to address specific disputes and prevent conflicts at the local level.
Local peace committees are (superficially) modelled after social institutions deemed
traditional, and are therefore an attempt to standardize an aspect of customary law. This
article explores the ethnography of local peace committees in Enoosupukia, a former
hotspot of interethnic clashes in Kenya. It relies on ethnographic data collected between
2014 and 2015 to describe the composition of local peace committees, discusses conflict
resolution at the grass-roots level, and highlights their effectiveness and the emerging
constraints on their performance. Although necessary in the resolution of local disputes
through arbitration, local peace committees constitute hybrid governance arrangements,
which tend to produce different modes of authority, operations, and legitimacy, with the
possibility of intensifying clashes between traditional (informal) rules and formal law.