ABSTRACT
In recent years, policy and academic attention has focused increasingly upon the urban context of human rights. This chapter explores actor practice, influence of characteristics of place and context in broader urban politics of human rights through a case study of the rapid rise of Nairobi's Social Justice Centre (SJCs). Informal areas of Nairobi are still ‘not recognised or addressed by public authorities as an integral or equal part of the city’. In accounting for the emergence of SJCs, there is a need to place them in a much longer arc of claiming and using human rights in the context of strategising for democratic reform in post-colonial Kenya. The main objective of the SJCs is ‘to build a social justice movement and the community solidarity necessary to contest and organize against the normalization of extra-judicial killings and all injustices’. SJCs members also use social media strategically for rapid sharing of information and quick mobilisation.
