Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi

Abstract

This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest “permissive spaces” for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is entrenched in local tensions and conflict, which adds to analyses of police killings that explore public concerns over crime, political mechanization, and individual motivations. Hence, the focus on police killings as a bordering practice highlights the interaction between police work and the local vicissitudes of bordering and bounding and how these pertain to the production of city- and ghettoscapes.