Enforcing the Line: An Ethnography of the Kenyan Border Regime

“Enforcing the Line offers an eye-opening ethnographic account of Kenya’s evolving border regime. Challenging clichés of African borders as chaotic or corrupt, Katrin Sowa reveals the complexities of everyday border enforcement and the global dynamics shaping them. From border officers to local communities, this book brings to life the human side of border control — highlighting both the legacies of colonialism and the ambitions of a continent in motion.” (Mirco Göpfert Professor for social and cultural anthropology at the Goethe University Frankfurt)

“This book is both rigorous and readable, presenting a lively multi-sited ethnography of border posts in Kenya which will be of great interest to scholars and policy-makers alike. Sowa brings out fascinating realities such as the daily lives of border officers and communities, their interactions and separation, creativity in implementing border policies in challenging contexts, and the winners and losers in Africa’s attempts to provide both seamless movement and surveillance.” (Kennedy Mkutu, Professor of International Relations, United States International University, Africa)

“Enforcing the Line offers an eye-opening ethnographic account of Kenya’s evolving border regime. Challenging clichés of African borders as chaotic or corrupt, Katrin Sowa reveals the complexities of everyday border enforcement and the global dynamics shaping them. From border officers to local communities, this book brings to life the human side of border control—highlighting both the legacies of colonialism and the ambitions of a continent in motion.”

—Mirco Göpfert, Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

This book analyses historic and contemporary border regime developments in East Africa, and draws a complex picture of borders control in Africa beyond stereotypical “Western” imaginations. Based on ethnographic research, it describes the everyday realities of Kenyan border officers dealing with colonial border legacies on the ground, and analyses actual enforcement practices. Moreover, the book examines the implementation process of One Stop Border Post (OSBP), which is currently taking place all over the African continent. OSBPs stand in between regional, pan-African as well as neo-colonial, capitalist interests, and will shape cross-border trade, migration, security and transnational relations in the future. The book offers a critical analysis of this implementation process with reference to local voices from different borderlands of Kenya with Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Sudan and Uganda. The case studies thereby exemplify the ambivalent reality of borders worldwide, which simultaneously open and close at the same time, whereby reproducing inequalities.

Katrin Sowa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research project in Kenya was financed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme in affiliation with Kenyatta University, Kenya.