“They Speak Our Language!”: A Kinship Anthropology of Policing and Oversight in Kenya

ABSTRACT This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin‐like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin‐like groups to implement change. Yet, I argue that oversight practices also occur within the realm of kin due to the ambiguities of kinship. By approaching policing through the lens of kinship, I show how relations of loyalty and belonging are not merely institutional effects, but forms of relatedness actively produced through everyday practices of kinning and dekinning. To exemplify this, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kenya between 2017 and 2018 and problematize the internal‐external oversight dichotomy prevalent in oversight studies. This paper contributes to anthropology of policing scholarship, and specifically anthropologists working on police reform and oversight.