When Obama Visited Kenya: (In)Securities and Graduated Sovereignty in Nairobi Denielle Elliott U nited States President Barack Obama made his first official visit to Kenya on 24 July 2015, landing in Nairobi. It was the first visit made by a sitting American president since Kenya’s independence in 1964. For weeks in advance, the nation worked with US security personnel and embassy staff to prepare for his visit, and the city of Nai- robi was completely transformed. An assemblage of technologies and interventions in Nai- robi—including road blockages, enhanced video surveillance, increased policing, and airport closures—marked Obama’s visit as Nairobi metamorphosed into an occupied city. 1 Material insecurities, such as deep urban poverty, urban refugees fleeing violence in Somalia, and threats of violence through terrorism, are perceived as growing problems in Kenya, and these concerns permeate everyday conversations. Kenya has endured a number of attacks by Al-Shabaab since the American embassy bombings in 1998, but these have intensified since Kenya invaded Somalia in October 2011. 2 Many of these attacks have resulted in large num- bers of deaths and casualties, and the United States and United Kingdom have consequently defined Kenya, and Nairobi more specifically, as an unstable and vulnerable nation at risk. 3 This paper reflects on Obama’s three-day state visit to Nairobi as a symbolic moment that represents the convergence of different histories and geographies of securitization. Although the event itself lasted just a few short days, a careful examination of the state visit, the media attention, and its effects on Nairobi reveals the layering of technologies of securitization in the contemporary postcolonial cityscape. These include systemic histories of imperialist and colonial policing, national urban anticrime and gentrification programs, and transnational antiterrorist military interventions. This paper illuminates transnational secu- rity practices that breach national borders and the strange ways in which national security projects are taken up in transnational spaces. 4 To make sense of this symbolic moment, I draw on theoretical insights from those working on the anthropology of the state, specifically on sovereignty and its many forms. 5 I argue that this historical moment illuminates what Aihwa Ong, Mariella Pandolfi, and others have described as the coexistence of disparate modes of sovereignty: a local, territorialized security focused on the Kenyan nation-state, and urban sovereignty in Nairobi in the face of urban refugees and poverty, and the military apparatus of the United States focused on a supposed ‘global’ terrorism threat. Although Ong’s work speaks directly to global financial markets and the ways in which they disrupt territorial sovereignty in South-East Asia, her discussion of a “graduated sovereignty” works well in the context of this security