ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a detailed theoretical conceptualisation of how factors associated with economically induced social and political strains, ethnicity, and the dualism of elite consensus and fragmentation co-produced the Kenyan state reform movement. It specifically analyses why and how secular, middle-class civil society organisations emerged to lead the transformation of pro-democracy struggles into a movement for constitutional reform in the early 1990s. The chapter further illustrates how the political context was shaped by the co-evolutionary actions of state and its antagonists. This, coupled with the fragmentation of actors opposed to the Moi/KANU state, allowed civil society organisations to emerge as leaders of the initial phase of contention. The chapter further attributes the decay of this wave of contention to the infamous Inter-Parties Parliamentary Group (IPPG) political elite consensus. Thereafter, the mantle of leadership passed to religious leaders in the next wave.
