An Assessment Of The Economic And Social Reintegration Of Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters In Kwale County, Kenya

Abstract

The Global Terrorism Index indicates that Sub-Saharan Africa is currently “the epicenter of terrorism” accounting for almost half of the terrorism-related deaths in the world. Therefore, there is urgent need to shrink the pool for recruitment of potential terrorist fighters. To accomplish this, counter-terrorism operations, and its sub-set of countering violent extremism efforts, needs the often-ignored insights and perspectives of the returning foreign ‘terrorist’ fighters (hereafter returnees). Therefore, this study adopted qualitative research carried out in in Kwale County, focused on the government’s amnesty for returnees from Somalia of 2015. Kwale was chosen as a field study site because it is one of the counties – alongside Mombasa and Lamu – that has been a traditional target for radicalization by al-Shabaab and the region that accounts for the largest population of the returnees. The study findings reflect the perspectives of the returnees on the factors that contributed to, and those that impeded the success of their economic and social reintegration back into their host communities. This study recommends that the government treats with urgency the issue of legitimizing the amnesty program through an Act of Parliament. This study focused on the male returnees from Somalia but there were women and children who also returned under the amnesty program. Research findings on these vulnerable groups of people and the challenges that they encounter in their reintegration are largely missing, and so scholarly studies would be beneficial in filling this gap.