ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the inherent complexity of the group-based and collective emotional experience of Kenya's post-election violence (PEV) of 2007 and early 2008, and its connections with social and ethno-political affiliations. PEV is taken to demonstrates how histories and traditions of group identification and political competition along ethnic lines eventually led to direct physical conflict in many Kenyan communities. Kenya's PEV demonstrates the complex mixture of group-based and collective emotions involved when nations experience traumatic intergroup violence. With PEV, a range of widely shared negative emotions were experienced about Kenya's status as an independent and modern African state. Group-based and collective shame occurs at a national level through one's own actions or the actions of people connected with one's ethnic or national group. Shame resulted from the explicit display of police violence against civilians as captured by the media, and also after moments of reflection on in-group and out-group mutations of perceptions of insiders and outsiders.
