Kenya’s 2017 electoral impasse a severe test to liberal peace-building

Voters queue to cast their ballots at Ruthimitu Secondary School in Dagoretti South on August 8, 2017. Despite a decade of peace, Kenya’s General Elections on March 4, 2013 and August 8, 2017 carry a story of resignation and disillusionment with liberalism. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Looking back, Kenya was hailed as one of Africa’s 24 democracies by 2008.

  • But the country is living proof that democratic reversals can be expensive: 1,300 died, 643,000 displaced and Sh150 billion ($1.5 billion) lost in the mayhem.

  • Despite a decade of peace, Kenya’s General Elections on March 4, 2013 and August 8, 2017 also carry a story of resignation and disillusionment with liberalism. 

America’s new world order is officially dead! This is the shattering, but unanimous, verdict of the world media this week, from Tokyo (Japan Times) to London (the influential Economist Magazine) and New York (Bloomberg). 

The plight of America’s efforts to globalise the liberal international order has little to do with President Donald Trump — or his all-consuming presidency and controversies. It is a systemic crisis of liberalism globally.

Angela Merkel, elected for the fourth consecutive time as German Chancellor (and by the way, Germany direly needs a term limit!) is far and away the West’s best positioned leader to assume the mantle of what remains of the liberal order.

However, it is rising China and resurgent Russia that take the prize for derailing America’s ambition for a post-Cold War liberal empire.

The liberal triumphalism following the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s fell into a profound crisis in the 1997-2017 interlude. 

LIBERALISM

The implications of liberalism’s crisis for the global peace building enterprise is the subject of a new book by the British scholar, David Chandler, Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997-2017 (Palgrave, 2017).

Chandler draws inspiration from the classic work of another British academic, E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 (MacMillan, 1939), whose reflections have shaped liberal thinking in the post-War period.

In a nutshell, the two eminent British scholars call for “a shift from one way of thinking to another” to effectively navigate the crisis of liberalism by focusing on “the world as it is rather than how we would like it to be.” It is a bold call to realism and pragmatism.

Although Chandler’s study is on the narrow area of peacebuilding, it speaks to the larger crisis of the liberal international order.

DRAWING ATTENTION

It has profoundly shed light on the electoral impasse in Kenya after the country’s Supreme Court nullified the August 8 presidential election result and, in the run-up to the October 26, 2017 repeat election.   

Kenya’s October 26 poll is already drawing the attention of scholars of peacebuilding.  The country is one of the test cases for the international research initiative, “Innovations in Peacebuilding: International Norms, Local Dynamics”, by scholars from the University of Denver (US), the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway, the Nepal Peacebuilding Institute, and the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Significantly, 2017 marks 10 years of relative peace since the bitterly disputed presidential election of December 27, 2007 that plunged the country into a frightful conflict.

On October 26, the sustainability of this legacy of externally-brokered peace will be on trial.

Also on trial will be the global architecture of peace building, tasked with reducing “the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict.” But peace building is also at a crossroads with experts fretting the “death of the peacebuilding moment.”

HYBRID PEACE

Looking back, Kenya was hailed as one of Africa’s 24 democracies by 2008. But the country is living proof that democratic reversals can be expensive: 1,300 died, 643,000 displaced and Sh150 billion ($1.5 billion) lost in the mayhem.

What has been theorised as Kenya’s “hybrid peace” is a tribute to the role of the international community and most significantly the African Union whose Panel of Eminent African Personalities brokered the peace that silenced the guns and set the country on the path of far-reaching reforms of its faltering institutions.

Reforms between 2008 and 2013 resulted is one of the most ambitious and impactful peacebuilding processes in the post-Cold War Africa, often touted in World Bank circles as “Kenya’s quiet revolution.” This lynchpin of Kenya’s liberal reforms is the 2010 Constitution.

Despite a decade of peace, Kenya’s General Elections on March 4, 2013 and August 8, 2017 also carry a story of resignation and disillusionment with liberalism. 

Conceptually, this disillusionment raises the million-dollar question: Can peacebuilding, however successful, secure democracy? The jury is still out. 

PEACEBUILDING

In his article, “Building Democracy While Building Peace” (Journal of Democracy, 2011), University of Ottawa scholar Christopher Zürcher posits that peacebuilding is “better in ending wars” than in fixing democracies.

Kenya’s experience in the period between 2013 and 2017 seems to suggest that the country’s post-conflict “hybrid peace” did not result in the consolidation of the culture and institutions of democracy.

Instead, combatants who lost the election went back to the trenches and to the revolutionary language of “resistance” and reform rather than focusing on fostering a loyal robust opposition.  Sadly, opposition politics carries a strong idiom and mindset of “war” rather than “democratic competition”.

Interventions by the International Criminal Court in Africa to pursue transitional justice goals and propelled by liberal universalism have worsened conflict situations, and drew intense criticism from local scholars and leaders.

In a powerful article published in the New York Times (February, 5, 2014), former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and renowned Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani argued that “courts cannot end civil wars.”

POWER-SHARING

Many expected the negotiated hybrid peace to end the idea of power-sharing, censured for suspending opposition, stunting the growth of competitive democracy and stoking power struggles in post-conflict countries.

As Denis Tull and Andreas Mehler (African Affairs, July 2005) rightly observe, irrespective of their effectiveness in any given case, power-sharing agreements have often contributed to the reproduction of insurgent violence as the hidden costs of executive power-sharing.

Public debates in Zimbabwe and Kenya reveal that despite successful transitions to democracy, the idea of executive power sharing has refused to go away. Some losers in elections devise strategies to undermine institutions, foment crisis and force a power-sharing arrangement.

Calls for reform of institutions ahead of critical elections are hardly about strengthening institutions, it is about capturing, weakening or destroying them.

As if the cup was destined to overflow, newly reformed institutions have become susceptible to political capture and used in intra-elite election disputes. 

 

Prof Peter Kagwanja is a former Government Adviser and currently heads the Africa Policy Institute (API)