Daniel Branch

Dr. Daniel Branch is an assistant professor in history at the University of Warwick. He is the author of the forthcoming Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization, which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. He is currently writing a political history of post-colonial Kenya, to be published by Yale University Press in 2011.

Posts by Daniel Branch:

Friday, July 17th, 2009

The Normalisation of Violence

Writing more than twenty years ago about Idi Amin’s Uganda, Ali Mazrui observed that

Everyone was talking about the tyrant. I suggested that more people had died in the second half of the Amin years as a result of anarchy than as a result of tyranny. Many of the killings were not orchestrated orders from the top. Soldiers perpetrated them in night clubs, at road-blocks, in the villages. Yet the cases due to anarchy were not conspicuous political significance. They were cases of a basic moral collapse among those who wielded weapons.

Read the rest of The Normalisation of Violence.

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