Peace - What Is It Good For?

Abstract: The use of peace narratives in order to delegitimize political opposition has been observed in electoral autocracies. One such case was in Kenya in 2013, which gave rise to the theory of peaceocracy. Peaceocracy is conceptualized as being made up of six components, namely a fragile peace, incumbents cast as peacekeepers, peace as a responsibility of the citizenry, delegitimization of certain issues, curbing of oppositional participation in elections, and international support. By applying these criteria, this study has applied the concept of peaceocracy to the 2017 Kenyan elections through a narrative analysis, while also situating the theory in the larger field of peace research. The findings indicated that while there were attempts to establish conditions of a peaceocracy, the opposition effectively used counter-narratives to contest issues that the government tried to remove from the political agenda, leading to only a partial occurrence of peaceocracy in 2017. Furthermore, the study suggests potential improvements for the theory, tying it to existing concepts in peace research such as everyday peace.