Chułek M., (2019). Mob Justice and Everyday Life: The Case of Nairobi’s Kibera and Korogocho Slums, African Studies, 78(1), 385-402.
Based on ethnographic research in two slum areas of Nairobi, Kibera and Korogocho, this article explains the meaning and function of ad hoc acts of lynching called mob justice. The article treats mob justice as a specific type of institution that reflects local rules of life and argues that the analysis of such acts must take into account that they are produced within a broader social framework in which they are practised. Mob justice undergoes reproduction to maintain the communities of Kibera and Korogocho. The form of lynching stems not from the fact that it is limiting crime but that it produces an imaginary realisation of a certain dimension of experience of the mob’s members, which is collective agency.