Agency through archives: the case of Kenya’s Waki commission

Commissions of inquiry are a useful governance tool, which, through their ritualised proceedings, look to provide authoritative knowledge that can help to distract attention, justify policies, and/or assert state control. By drawing upon the case of Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, or Waki Commission (2008), we show how the very characteristics that help commissions of inquiry to serve as a useful governance tool – namely, their ostensible independence, involvement of experts, ability to offer recommendations, and public nature – render them unpredictable. Final reports can offer findings and recommendations that make demands upon or pose challenges to the government and, even if recommendations are never implemented, a commission's public nature ensures that the process and the discussions around it become part of the official archive, public debates, and social imaginaries. As a result, commissions of inquiry exhibit a legitimacy paradox: the performance of legitimacy structurally sows seeds of agency that can be used in unintended ways by those involved and by those who subsequently refer to a Commission's life or legacy. Taken together, this ensures that commissions of inquiry are a more important and complex part of Kenyan and global politics than is generally acknowledged by practitioners and scholars.