Months after the outbreak of the uprising in Syria, Damascus continues its steady descent into sectarian strife and is at the epicenter of a regional struggle that may well shape the new political contours of the Middle East.
The recent events in the South Caucasus once again highlight the pervasive and destructive forces inherent in ethnic nationalism. These should not be misunderstood as simply local phenomena for they have wider ramifications and are shaped by factors well beyond their locale.
In this brief piece we will look at Kenya’s politics of displacement. Recent violence in this important East African country left over a thousand dead from police bullets, fires and machetes and around 600, 000 displaced. Whilst such violence reaches back into the colonial period, the combination of bad government and the revival of multi-party elections is also central.
As in the other five slums in the city, people in Eastleigh are poor. They survive on far less than the average daily wage in Kenya, which is equal to about one and a half U.S. dollars. Lack of food is only one of their troubles. The political turmoil has exposed and exacerbated decades-worth of tribal tensions. While apparent to many Kenyans, for most of the international community, those tensions were hidden under the thin veneer of an emerging democracy with steady economic development and relative state stability.
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