Assemblages of terror and the policing of settlement boundaries: Devolution and the production of order in northern Kenya

The 2010 Constitution of Kenya established devolution to address historical marginalization and promote equitable development. However, in the pastoral rangelands of northern Kenya, this reform has unintentionally functioned as a violent territorializing machine, reassembling governance into exclusionary ethnic orders. This paper uses assemblage theory to examine how devolution has transformed the logic of pastoral conflict from reciprocal raiding into a strategy of governing through terror. Based on qualitative research conducted between 2022 and 2024 in the contested borderlands of Amaya and Lorogon, at the intersections of Samburu, Baringo, Turkana, and West Pokot counties, the study reveals how boundary-making has militarized the commons. The paper demonstrates that violence has evolved from an economic survival strategy (livestock rustling) into a political technique of territorial control, characterized by sieges, maiming, and targeted killings designed to displace rival communities. The findings show how the territorialization of ethnicity has reconfigured fluid pastoral spaces into rigid war machines, where county elites, security actors, and armed warriors assemble to enforce boundaries that administrative maps cannot guarantee. The analysis concludes that devolution has not merely decentralized power but has institutionalized a violence assemblage, turning the county unit into a vehicle for ethno-territorial dominance and dispossession. • Transformation of pastoral conflicts. • Ethno-territorialization. • Fragmentation of pastoral rangelands. • Boundary-making processes in Amaya and Lorogon. • Unintended consequences of devolution.