This dissertation argues that the process of Kenyan state consolidation in the 1960s built on colonial precedents that divided Northeastern peoples (Somali, Boran, etc.) from the “nation.” This alienation criminalized large segments of the population in ways that continue to impact everyday life there. From 1963 to 1968, Kenya violently asserted its sovereignty in the Northeastern portion of the country in what is conventionally known as the Shifta War and locally referred to as the gaf Daba, or “time stopping.” The war was named for the “shifta,” meaning bandits, who fought against the Kenyan state. Today, these “shifta” are more familiar as the Somali “pirates” and “terrorists” that dominate western imaginings of the Horn of Africa. The impact of these images is that former pariahs of Northeastern Kenyan communities have come to represent those communities. Local discourses, such as those intrinsic to the gaf Daba, have thus far been subsumed within the larger history of the consolidation of post-colonial nation-states, modeled on western archetypes. In other words, the very perspective of the people directly involved in the violence accompanying Kenyan independence in 1963 has been translated into a western political lexicon, thereby distorting history. Previous scholarship has focused on an international relations model in which the nation-state is taken as a given. This has failed to explain how competing ideas of sovereignty and healthy communities were central to the history of violence in the region. While the gaf Daba may appear simply to be a response to state-sponsored terror, the state's many development and civilizing projects were also indicative of "the end of time." This was especially the case since Northeastern communities were organized around cyclical time while development initiatives were married to a linear model of time. This dissertation explores and explains these dynamics through a historical lens.