Article I've written for the
Oxford Human Rights Hub:
In a landmark paper on Kenyan politics, Daniel Branch and Nic Cheeseman developed the term “bureaucratic-executive state” to describe how power came to be centralised in Kenya between the years 1952 and 1978. The over-centralisation began under British colonialism, and was taken forward by first president Jomo Kenyatta to ensure state administration complied with his directives, as opposed to being led by parliamentary deliberation. Against this trend, and against all the odds, in 2010 the Kenyan people promulgated a Constitution that is the most radically decentralised in the East African region. The winner-takes-all presidency that the bureaucratic-executive state created had proven too destabilising and distasteful, with a rigged election in 2007 leading to violence that left more than 1,100 dead and about 600,000 internally displaced. In reaction, a new Constitution was proposed that would make the presidency less powerful and less able to develop certain areas of the country at the expense of others.
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