Decolonisation, the Highest Stage of Counterinsurgency? Making the Post-Colonial State in Kenya

This paper is a historical exploration of counterinsurgency as politics and state-making. It evaluates the British Empire’s suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in its Kenya Colony between 1952 and 1960, in light of the country’s independence three years later in 1963. It is commonly asserted that victory against the insurgents and the continuing power of their allies after independence indicate that the post-colonial state was fundamentally ‘neo-colonial’ and a British construct. With other new states like Malaysia, Cyprus, and Ireland, decolonisation is seen as the natural outgrowth of a successful counterinsurgency strategy. Coercion and exclusion are, therefore, embedded in the DNA of these states and their elites.

This paper accepts that counterinsurgency fundamentally transformed these states but suggests that this process always involved much more compromise than previously assumed. In the Kenyan case, the British could never enact their totalising modernisation plans or destroy resistance. Counterinsurgency remained highly political - about who wielded power in local communities as much as at the national level. Ex-insurgents and their allies thus continued to be significant players in the brokering of independence – despite their absence from the negotiating table. Amnesties, ad hoc legal instruments, and entanglement between local party politics and state organs are as much legacies of the war as a powerful British-trained army.  The paper suggests that decolonisation can be seen as the highest stage of counterinsurgency, but precisely because effective counterinsurgency relies on illiberal compromises, something suggested by several recent conflicts.

Dr Niels Boender was awarded his doctorate at the University of Warwick in 2024, that looked at the aftermath of the Mau Mau insurgency in late- and post-colonial Kenya. He is currently an Early Career Fellow at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study working with the Imperial War Museum on the Legacies of the Mau Mau Conflict in Kenya.

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