Beyond Securitisation: A Gendered Peace Studies Approach to Violent Extremism in Kenya

Abstract

While dominant global policy frameworks and scholarship often understand violent extremism through securitised and state-centric lenses, this article offers a bottom-up reconceptualisation using a peace studies and gendered approach. Drawing on empirical data from Kenya, the study complicates current understandings by framing violent extremism as a continuum of direct, structural, and cultural violence rooted in everyday grassroots experiences. Utilising arts-based body mapping workshops, focus group discussions, and interviews in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kwale, the research centres participant agency and embodied knowledge to explore how local communities define and experience this violence. The findings reveal that participants conceptualise violent extremism as a multi-layered phenomenon driven by systemic governance failures, human rights violations, and marginalisation, rather than merely radical ideologies or non-state militancy. Crucially, these grassroots definitions are highly gendered. Male participants primarily associated violent extremism with state-sanctioned harms, such as police brutality, arbitrary arrests, and extrajudicial killings. In contrast, female participants identified deeply embedded cultural and structural harms, highlighting gender-based violence, specifically Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and intimate partner violence, as profound acts of violent extremism. Ultimately, the article argues that violent extremism is an everyday, relational, and embodied phenomenon. It calls for a departure from narrow counter-terrorism frameworks, advocating instead for holistic, peace-oriented strategies that address the foundational structural and cultural dimensions of violence sustaining this continuum of harm.