Citizen‐Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya

ABSTRACT This article privileges the grounded geographies of the war on terror, focusing on those who grapple with its everyday policing powers.   Informed by ethnographic research in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, I explore how Kenyan Muslim activists experience and make sense of the networked assemblages of police power that transform urban spaces into “gray zones” that fall within the ambiguous spectrum between war and peace. As US‐trained Kenyan police employ military tactics of tracking and targeting potential terror suspects in quotidian urban spaces, they rely on “pop‐up” interventions such as abductions, house raids, and makeshift checkpoints—flexible maneuvers designed to match the amorphousness of the so‐called enemy. I introduce the term citizen‐suspect to shed light on actually existing citizenship in the urban gray zone. Citizen‐suspects contend not simply with the fear and paranoia that come with subjection to surveillance and suspicion but with the knowledge that is needed to navigate the shape‐shifting geographies of transnational policing.