The Conundrum of Ethnic Recognition and the Limits of Group-Based Citizenship Campaigning in Kenya

May 2026

In this blog, Samantha Balaton-Chrimes (Associate Professor in Politics at Deakin University and Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness) argues that group-based citizenship campaigns, while genuinely effective for some stateless communities in Kenya, rest on and reinforce a culture of ethnicised belonging that carries significant risks — and that the digitisation of identity systems is making those risks harder to manage.

Kenya has emerged as a flagship example in global campaigns to end statelessness. Several small ethnic communities — Makonde, Shona and Pemba peoples — have moved from conditions of statelessness or undocumented nationality into recognised citizenship over the past decade. Their stories are genuinely heartening, and UNHCR holds these cases up as models.

Many cases of mass in-situ statelessness have their roots in group-based discrimination, including perhaps most famously the discrimination against Rohingya people that has led not just to statelessness but to genocide. It makes sense, then, to consider group-based recognition as a solution to exclusions from citizenship. But the Kenyan case also carries lessons that complicate any straightforward celebration of group-based citizenship campaigns as a transferable solution to statelessness, or even as the right approach within Kenya itself.

In my new book, Knowing Ethnicity, I dig into the origins of the idea that citizenship in Kenya is determined by one's ethnic identity. I examine the histories of map-making, the census, minority rights, and — crucially for statelessness scholars, activists, and law and policy makers — the ID card system and population register that confer de facto proof of citizenship. This research shows that there is no legal or regulatory basis for any connection between ethnic identity and citizenship. Contrary to popular discourse in and beyond Kenya, one's ethnic identity is in no way a legally relevant factor in one's right to Kenyan citizenship. But this does not mean there is no connection at all.

As the field of statelessness studies takes more account of lived experience and the political drivers of statelessness that lie behind legal exclusions, we are better apprehending the complexity of how statelessness is manufactured. This book contributes to that shift by showing the role and effects of ethnoracial classification as the bureaucratic channel through which broader identity politics comes to affect the right to nationality, regardless of what the law says.

Ethnoracial classifications as palimpsests

Whether or not to classify individuals by their ethnic or racial identities is an enduringly difficult policy question for states. (I use 'ethnoracial' here to refer to both ethnicity and race, in their various iterations and with the varying meanings they carry in different social contexts.) On the one hand, such classifications enable the production of information that can help redress marginalisation and disadvantage — statistics to demonstrate inequalities, and identification of individuals as potential beneficiaries of affirmative action. On the other hand, those same classifications enable the construction of difference and therefore potentially division, targeting, discrimination, profiling, and the normalisation of notions that some people belong and others do not. This operates at both the collective level in the stories told with data, and the individual level in the identification and targeting of particular people for discrimination or, in the worst cases, violence. Whether to classify, how to classify, and what to do with the resulting classifications are difficult questions. The effects of classifications vary further depending on the history and politics of each nation-state.

Classifications are typically developed across multiple bureaucratic tools, and not often in law itself. The most significant tools are, or have been, maps that delineate ethnic territories, censuses, and population registers. These classify people in space, as collective populations, and as individuals, respectively. The law may refer to such classifications, but in most cases it does not set them. It may prohibit discrimination based on ethnic, racial or religious identity, or confer affirmative action on marginalised groups, but it does not usually specify what those identities are. That is the role of bureaucracy.

Each of these tools — the map, the census, the register — frequently has its origins in colonial administration. It is well documented that knowledge about identity differences was as vital to colonial control as economic coercion and violence. Studies of caste in India have been especially illuminating of this colonial technology. Across Asia and Africa, where many of the largest cases of in-situ statelessness are found, whether people fall into an excluded category or not often depends on these classification practices and their postcolonial persistence.

In Kenya, as I show in the book, the first documentary classifications of ethnicity were adopted in the early decades of the twentieth century by the British colonial administration to determine which 'tribes' belonged where. Once this was constructed, it became possible to limit the movement of Africans to their Native Reserves, conveniently reserving the most fertile territory for settler farmers and white capital accumulation. The first register of people, which later formed the basis of today's population register, was of able-bodied men over fifteen available for labour extraction. That register, and the kipande — copper tins worn around the neck, containing papers listing employment history and fingerprints — had to include 'tribe' in order to know where to send these men when their labour was no longer wanted. Some decades later, the first census in 1948 treated it as self-evident that ethnicity should be enumerated alongside gender and age. All these tools were carried over into postcolonial administration and persist today explicitly (the population register, the census) or implicitly (notions of ethnic territory).

Together, these ethnic classifications have shaped how Kenyans see themselves and are seen by others. Mara Loveman has described ethnoracial classifications in Latin American censuses as producing pictures of nations for display to the nations themselves and to the international community. Her metaphor of the painting and the gallery is apt, not only as commentary on representation but because it gestures toward the art, not the science, of classification. Formalised, state-based ways of knowing identities are enacted through the map, the census, and the register, each embodying claims of certainty, fixity, permanence and legibility. But as I show in the book, they are palimpsests — the result of layers of bureaucratic and political sediment accumulated over time, bearing the markings of colonial and postcolonial administrative need and political desire, without constituting a wholly deliberate or intentional artifice. They are never as neat as they are made to appear.

In postcolonial theory, the metaphor of the palimpsest draws attention to what was erased by colonialism, the contingency of colonially constructed narratives, and the possibility of future reinscription that can reassert the agency of the colonised. Like animal skin parchments that are reused but on which prior text can still sometimes be detected, old inscriptions are not permanently erased but lie below the surface and sometimes resurface. The tools of knowledge production I trace in this book are similarly products of expediency. They reflect the desire of colonial officials for extraction and control, the ambitions of postcolonial presidents for numerical dominance, administrative and political aspirations for national unity — and also the incompleteness of all these projects.

It is in the space between the performance of certainty and the reality of vagueness that ethnicity has come to play a role in access to citizenship in Kenya. Only by understanding the broader practices and politics of ethnic classification can we make sense of this.

Law, bureaucracy and the space between

The Makonde, Shona and Pemba cases are genuinely significant as examples of how mass statelessness can be remedied. Roughly 4,000 Makonde people, descendants of Mozambican plantation workers and civil war migrants, had 97% of their community lacking both birth certificates and ID cards in 2015. After a high-profile march to Nairobi in 2016, presidential recognition as the '43rd tribe of Kenya', a Gazette Notice compelling registration and waiving fees, and a dedicated outreach programme involving paralegals, chiefs and National Registration Bureau (NRB) officials working in ad hoc centres, around 1,200 Makonde people received ID cards and 2,000 received birth certificates. The Shona community, descendants of Zimbabwean missionaries living in Nairobi, and the Pemba community on the coast followed a similar path, with many Shona people receiving IDs in 2019 and Pemba people in 2023.

What these cases share is that presidential recognition generated the political will and bureaucratic resources to undertake registration drives tailored to each community's specific circumstances. The recognition itself had no legal force. What it produced was attention, funding, goodwill and practical workarounds — allowing NRB to accept atypical documentation, waive requirements for certificates of good conduct, and organise outreach in difficult-to-access areas. As models for addressing mass statelessness rooted in historical exclusion and discrimination, this is instructive.

However, this pathway to citizenship only worked because of a broader political culture in which ethnic identity is understood as a prerequisite for Kenyanness. That culture, in turn, is heavily shaped by bureaucratic classifications used across multiple arms of the state which have, over more than a century in some cases, cultivated connections between ethnic identity and territory, ethnic identity and nationhood, and ethnic identity and individual belonging. Over recent decades, and in no small part because of these statelessness campaigns, an increasing politico-cultural connection has now also been forged between ethnic identity and minority rights.

Consider the risks

These campaigns to remedy statelessness via ethnic group recognition, while hugely successful for these particular communities, should be treated with caution. They did not campaign on the right to nationality under the letter of the law. They campaigned for nationality on the basis of a profoundly ethnicised approach to belonging. In doing so, they have significantly reinforced the power of the palimpsests of ethnic classification in Kenya.

This is not necessarily a problem in itself. I argue in the book that these stories underscore the necessity of seeing ethnicity as a source for politically constructive forms of belonging and inter-ethnic solidarity. They are an important counter to much pessimism about the role of ethnicity in public life.

At the same time, there are at least two significant patterns of political culture also reinforced by this approach that are less welcome. The first is that it rested upon, and has strengthened, practices of patrimonialism in which politicians exchange recognition for votes. This in turn builds expectation. The example of the Nubian community illustrates this. Following citizenship, there is now an expectation that jobs and development resources will also be distributed along ethnic lines. Though most Nubian people are now recognised as citizens, in the book I show how they continue to seek ‘a code’ they believe will confer more jobs and resources, and they lean heavily on local politicians to do so.

The second pattern is that as long as nationality is distributed according to ethnic identity, some people will be left out. The cautionary case is that of Galje'el people, a small sub-clan of ethnic Somalis. Their experience of citizenship deprivation is longstanding: many had documents confiscated in the notorious 1989 mass screening of Somalis under President Moi, accompanied by serious violence and mass deportation. Despite court victories, including a 2013 High Court ruling in their favour, the right to documentation has remained largely on paper. NRB visited the community after the ruling but little action followed. Galje'el people are very unlikely to benefit from presidential recognition as an 'ethnic group of Kenya', not because they lack entitlement but because they lack palatability. Their association with the broader Somali community — whose identities and cross-border movements the Kenyan state has never come to terms with — makes them politically toxic in the eyes of many politicians.

Where to from here?

My hope for this book is that it draws more attention to both the potential benefits and the risks of ethnic classification across numerous fields, but especially for the right to nationality. Several lessons can be drawn from the Kenyan case for others in the region and beyond.

The first is simply that classifications are unlikely to be as fixed as they appear, even when government officials (and everyone else) speak about them as if they are. Even Myanmar's '135 ethnic groups' may turn out to be more groundless than it first seems. This opens up possibilities for contesting the exclusion of particular ethnoracial groups, both politically and legally.

The second is that precisely because ethnoracial identities and their bureaucratic classifications lack fixity, careful and vigilant strategies to make the most of this fluidity can yield results. In a political environment open to pluralism and inclusion, recognition-seeking can advance the rights of minorities and stateless people.

Finally, and most urgently, the fluidity and vagueness that have rendered ethnoracial classificatory practices open to constructive political uses are now at risk. Digital ID systems and the biometric turn are doing something that decades of colonial and postcolonial bureaucracy did not fully achieve: locking categories in place. When ethnic classification is encoded into a digital system, the political flexibility that vagueness once allowed disappears. What was fluid becomes a data field. What was contested becomes a dropdown menu. This technological transformation risks fixing ethnoracial classifications in a way that functions much as if they were entrenched in law — extraordinarily difficult to change.

This is not a hypothetical risk. It is happening now, across Africa and beyond, as governments and international actors build digital civil registration and ID systems at speed. For those of us committed to building inclusive communities and ensuring rights, the case for vigilance about what ethnic knowledge is built into these systems, and what that might do, has never been more urgent.

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes is Associate Professor in Politics at Deakin University and an Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School. Her book Knowing Ethnicity is out now. Use discount code KGEY26 for a 20% discount at checkout.

_{Image by Richard Horvath on Unsplash}