Postgraduate research students

Synopsis: 

After independence from British colonial rule, Kenya’s government patterned its criminal justice institutions on colonial precedents, reproducing many of the most punitive penal practices and criminal measures. This legacy channel popular demands for increasingly severe punishments tend to undermine penal reform, preserving a chaotic and highly punitive prison system that conjures up vivid memories of its colonial ancestor.

In view of this lasting colonial legacy, an analysis of punishment under pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial rule in Kenya is long overdue especially now that decolonisation of penality has come to play a crucial role in questioning the generalisation of North Atlantic experiences and practices. This project explores the past, present and future of the ‘coloniality’ of punishment in Kenya. This project will be informed by a combination of qualitative methods, legal historical research and classic postcolonial literary sources to holistically consider a broader range of features of colonial punishment in one former colonised site, Kenya, exploring both how ‘coloniality’ continues to shape penal-legal practices and how a postcolonial future might be imagined through pre-colonial and anti-colonial reference points.

This project also aims to revisit and reconsider the dominant narrative of penal modernism from the standpoint of southern penality and show that this may reflect back to deepen understanding of penal developments in Northern societies as well as contributing to our knowledge of penal trajectories, cultures and practices of Kenya as one perspective from the Global South.

• Professor Sarah Armstrong
• Mr Andy Smith

External supervisors

Dr Martha Gayoye- Keele University