Social Movements in Kenya: Navigating Between Individual Motivations, Visions of Social Movements Organizations and Targets of Collective Action

Are social movements’ necessarily political actors that exist for a certain period of time before they disperse or transform themselves in institutionalized organizations? How does the organizational structure changes, and how do different individual purposes and organizations visions correlating and shaping social movements’ claims?  

Transformation processes as well as their trajectories will be described and analyzed in the paper proposed. In order to explain the relation between organizations and movements it is important to consider the contradiction between individual behavior of activists, organizational missions and social movements claims as well as their specific historical and political context. We use empirical data to analyze the meaning and modality of student’s and women’s movements in Kenya. The movements transformed themselves over certain periods of time and due to their specific political, societal, cultural and historical settings.

In the case of student movements the students changed themselves from a de facto opposition to the one party system in the 1980s to a current organization which is influenced by and connected to national politics. Current student leaders in Nairobi, for instance, are sponsored by national politicians and are integrated in clientelistic structures of Kenyan politics. Individual purposes of students seem at least partly in contradiction to organizations aims.

The example of women’s movements in Kenya shows how activists negotiate social movement claims in a contradicting field of international norms of women’s rights, the guidelines of donors and individual targets. A reasonable chance of social movement’s success decides about the strategy of action and to what extent they seize up an issue.

(Abstract together with Anna Deutschmann, University of Vienna)