The Elite Capture of "Gender Peace" Programs: How Feminist NGOs and Academia Perpetuate Urban, Middle-Class Ideals

Abstract

In this paper, the issue of elite capture in Kenya among the gendered sphere of peace education is explored with questions that focus on how a system of NGOs and academic institutions in urban areas reproduces a model of peace that excludes the grassroots realities. The study adopts a conceptual research design to synthesize post-2016 evidence on critical development and feminist political economy literature and analyze the power dynamics of knowledge production. The results show some kind of reinforced circle: a ubiquitous discursive conformity toward donor models, a verifiable homogeneity of leadership based in Nairobi and a systematic homologization blocking problem-aligned issues such as land rights intervention into peace curricula. Our interpretation of these findings is that there is a systemic issue that values inclusivity performance aspects above transformative political interaction, and this represents a form of epistemic injustice. The paper finds that the present day ecosystem although fully funded is construed in a manner that generates a depoliticized and ultimately unproductive kind of peace education. Therefore, we suggest a radical decentralization of conceptual power, such as donor requirements of community-based co-creation and self-reflection in the Kenyan gender peace elite. The main contribution of this study is to shift the debate on implementation gaps to the politics of knowledge, which states that sustainable peace needs a redistribution of the power of defining peace itself.