The Effectiveness of Preventive Diplomacy in Resolving Election Violence in East Africa: A Comparative Case Study Of Kenya and Burundi

The 1990’s era marked the advent of multiparty democracy which led to the rise in the number of elections in Africa. In 2015, elections were held in Egypt, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Lesotho, Guinea, Sudan and Nigeria. Elections have been conducted in many African countries and some of them have been marred with violence. Electoral violence has been seen to be recurrent in most areas thereby indicating that the underlying root causes of electoral violence remain unresolved. Kenya, a country situated in East Africa experienced electoral violence in December 2007 following the announcement of the presidential elections results. Violence broke out amid claims by the opposition that the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) had rigged the presidential elections in favour of the incumbent by declaring President Mwai Kibaki as the winner and his opponent Raila Odinga, the loser. The National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD) was the ruling political party in Burundi that announced that the incumbent President Pierre Nkurunziza would run for a third-term in the presidential elections scheduled for June 2015. This announcement sparked protests and violence by the opposition claiming it was a violation of the constitution which says that no president should be elected more than twice. Preventive diplomacy was found to work in the Kenya but not in Burundi. No studies have sought to explain why it worked in Kenya and not in Burundi. This thesis seeks to fill this looming gap by comparing the Kenyan case to the Burundian case to explain why preventive diplomacy attained success in the Kenyan case, while in the Burundian case it did not yield any success.