It’s been a long-time coming, but I am at last holding copies of my book! Feels like the past is gifting me something into this weird present, but I’ll take it. @CUP_PoliSci @MariaSoleMarsh @USFPoliticsDept cambridge.org/core/books/pol… /1 
2/ The book is a study of land and the process of electoral violence. Drawing on evidence from #Kenya’s 2007 election violence, I ask how political leaders organize violence & more so, why and when ordinary citizens participate.
3/ While many studies emphasize elite calculations, ethnic polarization, or institutional features of the state, I analyze #ElectionViolence as a joint production: a process of political mobilization requiring coordination between political leaders and ordinary citizens.
4/ Specifically, in places where land shapes livelihood & identity and property rights are weak, narratives around land provide a key device around which elites and citizens coordinate the use of violence (e.g., Kenya, DRC, India, Colombia, or Afghanistan).
5/ Land narratives are the ways people talk about their rights and claims to land in relation to others. They can function as collective stories to unify members of a national, ethnic, or racial group, but equally, create boundaries and exclude others.
6/ Drawing on hundreds of interviews & a household-level survey in Kenya, the book finds that election violence escalated only when a subset of residents linked electoral outcomes with their ability to access or secure land.
7/ In these cases, violence became a means of ensuring a preferred candidate at all costs, or a mechanism to preempt or defend against one's own eviction.
8/ This scenario is most likely when there is: 1) moderate [land] inequality between 2 distinct groups, 2) contentious land narratives between these groups, and 3) a strong leader who can use these narratives to convince or compel ordinary citizens to fight.
9/ While the evidence in this book is specific to Kenya, there are broader implications as well, and in particular, to the divisive, and violent political discourse we see across many countries today.
10/ Namely, it speaks to way that leaders can tap into collective ideas around inequality, belonging, and territory to strengthen cleavages between “insiders/citizens” and “outsiders/migrants”...
11/11 …both to strengthen political support & to encourage or justify violence against others – be they African immigrants in Italy, Mexican immigrants in the U.S, Muslims in India, Kikuyu in parts of Kenya, or Rohingya in Myanmar.
