APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 78 78 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL In-depth interviews were conducted with parliamentary candidates from the following parties and areas: Kisumu rural constituency; Patriotic Party of Kenya, Eldoret East constituency; the Independent Party and Makadara constituency, Nairobi; the Party of Hope, Makadara constituency. Interviews with civic candidates included those in the Makongeni ward, Makadara constituency; Orange Democratic Movement, Kawangware ward; Dagoretti constituency, Orange Democratic Movement–Kenya, and Timboroa ward, in Eldoret South constituency under the Party of National Unity (PNU). District youth officers with the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports based in Kisumu and Eldoret were also interviewed, along with the youth advisor from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the ministry’s headquarters in Nairobi. Three respondents to in-depth interviews were aged fifty and above, three between the ages of forty and forty-nine, one between thirty-five and thirty-nine, eight between twentyeight and thirty-four, and five between twenty and twenty-seven. The total number of respondents was twenty, 30 percent of which were women. Two focus-group discussions were held in Mathare, an informal settlement, and South B, a middle-class settlement, both in Nairobi. One such discussion was held in Kisumu and another in Eldoret. The Kisumu and Eldoret sessions involved four participants, who provided a rural perspective from districts between fifteen and twentyfive kilometers from the two cities. Two youths representing Kamjesh, a youth vigilante group, attended the Mathare focus group in Nairobi, and two youth perpetrators of violence were in attendance in Eldoret and Kisumu. After data collection and screening, content analysis was employed to deduce meaning and identify relationships of emerging themes and their bearing on the subject matter. The issues of the objectivity of respondents and confidentiality were taken into consideration. THEORETICAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF VIOLENCE AND KENYAN POLITICS One purpose of electoral violence is to cause a change of behavior among those believed to wield power over resource distribution. In such cases, violence is used as a tool to bring dominant actors to the negotiating table and may be instigated by victims or by others within or outside the power structure. Remi Anifowose defines electoral violence as the ‘use of threat or physical act carried out by an individual or individuals within a political system against another individual or individuals and/or property with the intention to cause injury or death to persons and/or damage or destruction of property and whose objective, choice of target or victims, surrounding circumstances, implementation and effects have political significance that is [intended] to modify the behavior of others in existing arrangement of power structure [sic] that have some consequences for the political structure’.12 According to Makumi Mwagiru, ‘Political or electoral violence is . . . concerned with the issue of the legitimacy of government. It removes or fractures political competition, and is aimed at removing or cowering political dissent’. He further avers that electoral violence is geared toward subverting the ends of the electoral and democratic 12. Remi Anifowose, as quoted in Kwaja, ‘Do the people have faith in electoral democracy?’ 41.