Tracking Change: Monitoring Civilian Firearms Circulation in Northern Kenya

'Kenya’s northern borderlands are often seen through a prism of insecurity — cattle raids, intercommunal clashes, political unrest, and threats from external actors. Yet mobility, livelihoods, and kinship networks are the bedrock systems through which both communities and state security actors operate, shaping how civilian firearms are acquired, circulated, and ultimately used.

Stretching from Somalia in the east, across Ethiopia, to South Sudan and Uganda in the west, northern Kenya sits within a wider regional web of cross-border movement and informal trade. Within this landscape, firearms move incrementally, and in multiple directions, through informal border crossings, local mobility corridors, and everyday kinship and trade networks.

While broad trafficking patterns are generally understood, there is far less clarity about how many illicit firearms circulate among civilians in these areas. Even less clear is whether stocks are increasing, decreasing, or holding steady year after year.'

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See also the related Briefing Paper Monitoring Civilian Firearms in Borderlands: A Framework for Trend Analysis and Estimation