Crackdown economics: Policing of hawkers in Nairobi as violent inclusion

Abstract

Crackdowns on illegal hawking by policing authorities are often analyzed as a question of conflict between resistance of the marginalized and repression by an exclusionary urban governance. In this article I argue that we gain new insights about the position of hawkers in urban space by moving into a different analytical register when exploring the policing of street trade. If we understand crackdowns not as attempts to exclude hawkers from the city but rather as central elements in an economy that produces policing, as well as political alliances, we can see how violent policing practices offer hawkers a particular form of inclusion into urban space. Employing the notion of ‘crackdown economics’ I approach crackdowns on hawking from a perspective informed by anthropological literature on exchange relationships. I thus understand hawkers, officers and local politicians as being mutually engaged in an economy where they seek valuable returns through investments in social relations. The argument is based on an ethnographic study conducted in central Nairobi. I explore regular payments of bribes by hawkers to officers, the making and breaking of agreements between them, as well as seasonally occurring interference by local politicians in the run-up to elections.