Security
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I conducted this research during my PhD work at the University of Amsterdam. I examined how people and objects are put to work in various types of security practices and in the process contribute to the enactment of the state and of political subjects in Nairobi. I set out my work by asking: How is the state and its political subjects formed through socio-material security practices? After the terror attack at Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in September 2013, the Kenyan security sector experienced an increased demand for security services. Private security personnel, police, residents and various objects and technologies were mobilized in the securitization of Nairobi’s commercial and residential spaces. These public-private collaborations, also visible elsewhere in the world, challenge vested notions about the state holding a monopoly over the provision of security. Focusing on these practices, in my work I argue that we can better understand the state as a relational achievement that is enacted through socio-material security practices, rather than a given entity. I position my work in conversation with scholars in both political anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). 
My approach builds in particular on the work of Trouillot (2001), who proposes to focus on practices beyond those of government or national institutions, because it is there we can observe “state effects.” These effects concern first, the production of individualized subjects; second, their realignment into collectivities; third, the deployment of governance tools to classify and regulate collectivities; and fourth, the production of boundaries and jurisdictions. In this dissertation, I show how in security practices these state effects primarily lead to processes of political subjectification. I define security practices as any practices in which security, protection and safety emerge as a key concern and where people and objects are mobilized simultaneously. I show how characteristic of such practices is that people are ordered into two groups: those people considered to belong to various communities (households, neighborhoods, the city and the nation) and therefore in need of protection; and those people who are enacted as dangerous, criminal and not belonging to such communities.Security therefore cannot be considered as a public good. From my work on security practices in Nairobi emerges how someone’s security is always predicated on someone else’s insecurity. As Patricia Noxolo reminded me in a personal communication, we cannot talk about (in)security, because the parenthesis might lead to the assumption that security and insecurity can exist independently of each other. Instead, we need to think of in/security as the two are concatenated. 
In Nairobi as elsewhere, contemporary security practices rely on various objects and technological devices, from incredibly complex security system to barbed wire. These technologies help routinize the differentiation of threats from non-threats and as such contribute to making up the social world. These labels are often attached to specific social groups, most notably people “like us” and dangerous “others.” In this research I describe how in Nairobi this othering becomes visible in the discrimination of Muslims, Somalis and Somali-Kenyans, domestic workers, and young African men living in poor urban settlements. Security practices contribute to enact these categories of urban residents as criminal and dangerous.All photos are taken by the author (c).