Kadara Swaleh

Postdoctoral researcher
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

E-mail: kadara.swaleh@zmo.de

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)
Kirchweg 33
14129 Berlin

De:link//Re:link Project:

Infrastructural Ecologies: Ports, Pipelines, Railways, and Precarious Environmental Futures in East Africa

Kadara Swaleh

Research Interests

  • // Anthropology of Infrastructure
  • // Anthropology of Islam
  • // Theorizing from the South

Project Description

This postdoctoral project examines how large-scale infrastructures such as ports, pipelines, railways, and their expanding digital interfaces reshape coastal and inland ecologies in Kenya and Tanzania. Focusing on sites including Lamu Port, the Standard Gauge Railway, and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, the project traces how these interventions reorder landscapes, disrupt ecological relations, and generate new forms of environmental precarity.

Through multi-sited ethnography, ecological mapping, and archival research, the project explores how communities living along infrastructural corridors negotiate shifting environmental futures, from coastal degradation and altered fisheries to wildlife displacement and contested conservation regimes. It also investigates how digitalisation, particularly the virtualisation of port and logistical functions, reconfigures ecological livelihoods and governance practices in subtle but consequential ways.

By foregrounding ecology as the central analytic, the project situates East African infrastructures within broader debates on climate vulnerability, environmental governance, and the politics of development. It aims to show how infrastructures not only move goods and data but also transform the ecological conditions of life, producing uneven futures across the region.

Vita

Kadara Swaleh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His current research focuses on infrastructural ecologies in East Africa and investigates how ports, pipelines, railways, and emerging digital interfaces transform coastal and inland environments and generate new forms of ecological precarity. This postdoctoral project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space as part of the extended De:link//Re:link research program.

Kadara completed his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation, titled ‘They Call It Development, We Call It Pain: China’s Funded Railway Project and the Informal Labor Market in Mombasa, Kenya’, analysed how Chinese-funded infrastructural projects along the Kenyan coast reshape everyday life, political subjectivities, ecological relations, and moral expectations of the state. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and spatial analysis, the study demonstrates how infrastructures function as political and ethical terrains that generate precarity, disrupt ecological rhythms, and shape claims for recognition and inclusion.

He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Archaeology and a postgraduate degree in Religious Studies from the University of Nairobi in 2012. He taught at Pwani University in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies before joining Kenya’s ruling party in 2016 as a senior administrator, where he served as a liaison to the Communist Party of China.

Selected Publications

  • // Swaleh, K. (Forthcoming 2026). Railways, Parks and Conflict: Impact of the New Silk Road on a Wildlife Corridor in Kenya. In Cultural Infrastructure, Art and Heritage along the New Silk Road, edited by Claudia Derichs, Linda Gerlach, and Tanya Talwar. Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing (HASP).
  • // Kresse, K., Nassir, N. A., and Swaleh, K. (Forthcoming 2026). Philosophizing in Swahili Society, Through Poetry. polylog: Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren, Issue 55.
  • // Swaleh, K. (Forthcoming 2026). A Noble Man Is His Actions: Confronting Post Slavery Hierarchies in a Kenyan Village. In Becker Felicitas et al. (eds.), The Aftermaths of Slavery in East Africa. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • // Swaleh, K. (Forthcoming 2026). On Parallel Tracks: Kenya's Vision 2030, the SGR Railway, and the Global Sustainability Agenda. In Jon Abbink and Samadia Sadouni (eds.), Sustainable Futures at a Crossroads: Politics, Environment and Development in Contemporary Africa. Leiden University Press.
  • // Kresse, Kai and Kadara Swaleh, 2021. Ustadh MM, Mtu wa Watu (“a man of the people “): Poet, Imam and engaged local intellectual. In Mahmoud Mau, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke (eds.): In this Fragile World. Swahili Poetry of Care by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau. Brill. Pp. 12-24. Serie: Islam in Africa.
  • // Kadara Swaleh., 2014. “What Does Philosophy Want? A Kiswahili Poem by Sheikh Msallam of Lamu, Kenya.” The Annual Review of Islam in Africa, Issue No. 12/2, pp. 79 – 84, (UCT Publication).
  • // Kadara Swaleh., 2013. “Islamic proselytizing between Lamu and Mozambique: The Case of Kizingitini Village.” Social Dynamics, Volume 38, No. 3, pp. 398 – 418, Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
  • // Kadara Swaleh., 2011. “The Demise of Religio- Cultural Heritage of the Swahili People of Kenya” in (eds) Rocha Chimera and Mohammed Karama’s Kiswahili Research and Development in Eastern Africa, Mombasa, Jors Publishers, pp. 322- 338.