Narratives of Conflict and Identity: Al-Shabaab’s Mobilisation Strategies and Counter-Terrorism in Kenya

In the last decade, Kenya has suffered a dramatic escalation of terrorist attacks by the Somali group Al-Shabaab, that has caused more than 250 incidents between 2013 and 2017. The intensification of Al-Shabaab’s activities beyond the Somali border has been facilitated by the emergence of a supportive environment within Kenya, providing militants with increasing financial and human resources. Indeed, the group has succeeded in penetrating the social fabric of Kenyan marginalised communities, establishing links with some religious centres and turning the country into a major recruitment pool. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Al-Shabaab’s strategies of mobilisation in Kenya, examining propaganda documents released by the group through its press office and its main journal, Gaidi Mtaani. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to terrorism, the paper relies on analytical tools from the research on social movements, using frame analysis to explore the imaginary promoted by militants to achieve recruitment of potential supporters. The paper shows how, rather than leveraging primarily a global radical Salafi ideology, Al-Shabaab acts as a signifying agent, drawing links between more “profane” segments of local narratives, symbols, myths and collective experiences to forge interpretative orientations resonating among targeted audiences. In particular, the group seeks to capitalise on conflictual dynamics in Kenya by aligning its collective action frames with 1) Kenyan Muslim and ethnic Somali communities’ historical narratives of social and political exclusion; 2) their core values and beliefs; 3) their experiences of violence in the post-9/11 counterterrorism framework. Such findings have considerable implications, pointing to the need of more context-sensitive counter-terrorism measures dealing with the sources of instability that shape a socio-political and cultural terrain on which the terrorist message takes root.