08/01/2021
Peace campaigns in historical and comparative perspective.
Peace messaging peaked in Kenya around the 2013 election when the newly instituted National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) worked with local administrators, organizations and networks to monitor hate speech; media houses and international organizations trained journalists on conflict-sensitive reporting and called for peace; theatre groups, musicians, and public advertizing called upon Kenyans to vote in peace; and politicians competed to display their peace-loving credentials.15 Indeed, while peace campaigns attracted significant funding and support from the Kenyan government, local organizations, external donors, and ordinary citizens also promoted peace messages and admonished those whose utterances or actions they feared might trigger violence.16 However, while such calls were particularly intense in 2013 in the wake of the 2007/8 post-election crisis, they have a much longer history. On the eve of the country’s independence elections in 1963, the departing governor appealed to everyone ‘to maintain the peace’ and ‘ensure that this period passes without violence or disorder’.17 This was later echoed by presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, with calls for peace becoming particularly central to Moi’s one-party state (1978–1992) and to the ruling Kenya African National Union’s (KANU’s) multi-party election campaign in 1992. It was also evident during the country’s most recent elections in 2017 when a mix of dialogue meetings, speeches, music, art and theatre were once again deployed as part of a campaign for peaceful polls.
