"They Speak Our Language!”: A Kinship Anthropology of Policing and Oversight in Kenya

This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin-like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin-like groups to implement change. Yet, I argue that oversight practices also occur within the realm of kin due to the ambiguities of kinship. By approaching policing through the lens of kinship, I show how relations of loyalty and belonging are not merely institutional effects, but forms of relatedness actively produced through everyday practices of kinning and dekinning. To exemplify this, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kenya between 2017 and 2018 and problematize the internal-external oversight dichotomy prevalent in oversight studies. This paper contributes to anthropology of policing scholarship, and specifically anthropologists working on police reform and oversight.