In the past, Kenya has faced numerous threats and challenges to national unity which have become increasingly sophisticated and complex over time. The ethnic clashes of 1992, 1997, 2002 and most recently, the post-election violence of 2008 highlighted the country’s susceptibility to violent conflicts. Specifically, the post-election violence of 2008 drew attention to how long-standing grievances interact with immediate triggers to create violence that, ironically, leaves those most aggrieved worse off than before. The crisis also highlighted the importance of meaningful responses to conflict, particularly at a structural level.

Although the concern to promote peace and stability in Kenya has been with policy makers and peacebuilders for decades, the efforts were at best ad hoc and disjointed due to absence of a viable institutional policy framework to mobilize, coordinate and consolidate various initiatives  into a more cohesive and action-oriented mechanism to strategically drive peace-building activities in Kenya. In this regard, the Government of Kenya established the National Steering Committee on Peacebuilding and Conflict Management (NSC) in 2001 and placed the NSC Secretariat within the MOSPAIS in November 2002. The establishment of this multi-agency peace architecture to coordinate peacebuilding and conflict management in the country was borne out of the need to incorporate traditional justice resolution mechanisms into the formal legal-judicial system of conflict mitigation and partner with CSOs in order to engender conflict sensitivity to development as it has been largely accepted that a peaceful, stable and secure society is a prerequisite for sustainable development.