Historians of nomadic societies in East Africa have emphasized their high mobility as the core of the pastoral mode of subsistence. It has long been supposed that borders were procedures for containing this mode of subsistence and making such societies amenable to administration. However, recent scholars have approached the issue from a different angle. They insist that borders are arbitrary institutions that have been imposed regardless of the disposition of cultural areas. For them, the drawing of boundaries can be approached as a process in which a variety of actors negotiate with each other, produce meanings, and create profitable opportunities. On the basis of this methodological perspective, this study explores the political impact of boundaries drawn by the colonial state in northeastern Kenya on the Somali pastoralists. This study is distinctive in that it investigates administrative boundaries instead of international borders. To date, scholarly attention has been mainly devoted to the latter. However, this does not mean that administrative boundaries have less significance; internal borders offer a better opportunity to reflect on the specific meaning of statehood, especially in the case of peripheral borderlands. By examining how the government territorialized a specific sub-clan of Somalis and how the latter engaged with such territorialization, this study provides a nuanced understanding of colonial rule in the frontier region of northeastern Kenya. It argues that the porous boundaries were consequences not of the restrictive nature of state rule but of a specific kind of governmentality in a frontier region where administrative and judicial powers were concentrated in the hands of local officials. Furthermore, the Somali sub-clan, whose collective identity was anchored by the setting of these boundaries, struggled to utilize them for a politics of authority and territoriality.
