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[Press] New publication \ Peace came from the herders: Supporting peace amidst drought, food insecurity and conflict. Lessons from Marsabit country, Kenya

• Violent conflicts play a crucial role in current food crises. In northern Kenya, the number of food insecure people is now at its highest level over a decade. At the same time, the politicization of livestock raiding as well as land contestations are of increasing concern. This Study Report analyses how the three factors of drought, hunger and violent conflict interrelate in Marsabit and recommends steps to build peace and overcome food insecurity.
• Friday, 29 September 2023: Marsabit, the second largest county in Kenya, stands as a testament to the resilience of its rural communities in the face of environmental risks and ethno-political violence. The county has experienced five consecutive seasons of drought, resulting in severe livestock losses and increased violent conflicts despite intercommunal reconciliation and peace-building efforts. BICC researcher Marie Müller-Koné points out the causes involved: “Violent conflicts in Marsabit are no...

[Event] Regional Training on Physical Security and Stockpile Management (PSSM) in Nairobi, Kenya

• Friday, 22 March 2019: In partnership with the Regional Centre on Small Arms (RECSA), the Multinational Small Arms and Ammunition Group (MSAG) and the International Peace Support Training Centre (IPSTC), and with financial support from the German Federal Foreign Office BICC conducted a regional training on Physical Security and Stockpile Management (PSSM) of weapons, ammunition and explosives from 13-22 March 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya. This training was attended by 24 participants tasked with weapons and amm...

[Publication] Boundary-Making in a Contested Space. Food Security and Conflict Dynamics in Marsabit, Kenya

• Boundary-Making in a Contested Space. Food Security and Conflict Dynamics in Marsabit, Kenya
• This study reports on the results of a pilot study on food security and conflict dynamics in northern Kenya conducted by BICC in collaboration with Caritas Germany and its Kenyan partners Caritas Marsabit and PACIDA in 2022. The objectives were to identify the interrelationships between food crises and violent conflict in Marsabit and to identify opportunities for conflict transformation, including through humanitarian actors.

[Press] Training Programme for PSSM \ Handover to the Regional Centre on Small Arms in Nairobi, Kenya

• Nairobi. On 22 March 2019, the German peace and conflict research institute BICC together with the Regional Centre on Small Arms (RECSA), the German Federal Foreign Office, the Multinational Small Arms and Ammunition Group (MSAG) and the International Peace Support Training Centre (IPSTC) organized a handover ceremony of the Regional PSSM (Physical Security and Stockpile Management) Train the Trainer Course to RECSA.
• Thursday, 2 May 2019: Germany had been the lead nation in the highly-effective MSAG engagement from 2012 to 2019 which successfully trained over 300 participants from 18 countries as well as qualified 22 instructors. Six of these instructors also reached the highest training level of Senior Instructors, enabling them to develop and implement training courses by themselves. With this training the German military support within the Regional PSSM Training Seminar process for East Africa came to an end. Together with col...

[Publication] Anticipation, participation and contestation along the LAPSSET Infrastructure Corridor in Kenya

• Anticipation, participation and contestation along the LAPSSET Infrastructure Corridor in Kenya
• Pastoral counties in northern Kenya are expected to undergo massive social–ecological change ­in the coming years as a result of the government’s ‘Vision 2030’ with its large-scale investments ­and infrastructure projects. The Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor ­project is an ambitious infrastructure development project that links with other continental ­transport corridors traversing the country. The 500m-wide corridor is to consist of a railway, a ­highway...

[Staff] Evelyne Atieno Owino

• PhD Researcher
• Publication: Large Infrastructure Projects and Cascading Land Grabs, From around the beginning of the current millennium, East Africa has been experiencing a wave of large-scale infrastructure expansion. Moreover, in anticipation of the new and improved market linkages that major infrastructure projects promise to bring, a rush to grab land alongside new and recently upgraded transport infrastructure routes is taking place. There is a growing body of research that documents the increasing prevalence of land ...
• Publication: The political ecology of geothermal development: Green sacrifice zones or energy landscapes of value?, This contribution explores the potential of large-scale geothermal projects to benefit local communities, a topic about which little is known. We address this gap in the scholarly literature by focusing on Iceland and Kenya, two countries that have pioneered geothermal power generation infrastructure for many decades. While many large-scale renewable energy schemes have ended up as...
• Publication: Water Governance, Institutions and Conflicts in the Maasai Rangelands, Water scarcity in Narok county, Kenya may be attributed to demographic pressures, land-use changes, environmental degradation and the effects of climate change. This article combines methodologies from history and political science to investigate how local communities cope with water scarcity. In so doing, we consider how institutions, both indigenous and modern, mitigate conflict over access to and control of wa...
• As a little girl growing up in rural African village, Evelyne always had a dream to do something impactful within grassroot levels as a way of staying connected to her roots and also telling the stories of those who might not have the opportunity to do so themselves. A study trip to North Western parts of Kenya forever made her dream come true after interacting with indigenous pastoral communities who were continuously affected not only by violent conflicts but also by prolonged dro...

[Publication] Competing aspirations and contestations at Isiolo International Airport, Kenya

• Competing Aspirations and Contestations at Isiolo International Airport, Kenya
• The large-scale infrastructure of Isiolo International Airport has created contestation between the developers and nomadic pastoral communities. While these nomadic pastoralists (Borana, Turkana, Somali, and Samburu) are the principal inhabitants of Isiolo, some agriculturalists – the Meru ethnic communities – also live in the region. The airport project created controversy between these ethnic groups over land, giving rise to economic anticipation, land speculation, and alienation – selling of ...

[PDF Document] BICC_Working_Paper_7_2019.pdf   (1.39 MB)

[Publication] Territorialising Conservation: Community-based Approaches in Kenya and Namibia

• Territorialising Conservation: Community-based Approaches in Kenya and Namibia
• Community-based Conservation seeks to strike a balance between nature conservation and economic growth by establishing spatial and institutional settings that maintain and even regain biodiversity while simultaneously allowing for sustainable land use. The implementation of community-based conservation blueprints on communal, often agronomically marginal lands, is in many southern and eastern African countries encouraged by the national government. Despite vast academic literature on community-b...

[Publication] Security dynamics in conservancies in Kenya: The case of Isiolo County

• Security dynamics in conservancies in Kenya: The case of Isiolo County
• The community-based conservation model is an increasing phenomenon in Kenya, especially in northern pastoralist counties. In BICC Working Paper 3\2020 the author Kennedy Mkutu considers dimensions of inclusion and exclusion and subsequent conflicts around community based conservancies in Isiolo County. Currently, conservancies occupy an area larger than all national parks and have some of the largest numbers of wildlife in Kenya. They may be privately or government-owne...