This thesis explores the complex politics of youth in an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, as they negotiate between a globalized neoliberal economy and a very localized regime of state violence carried out by police. Situating youth politics in Kenya’s post-independence political history, it reveals that today’s regime of police violence against youth is in fact deeply constitutive of the Kenyan political fabric; moreover, every post-independence political transition has cemented ideas of youth subordination as central in managing youth politics, and national politics more broadly. In today’s configuration, a product of the neoliberal age, the economy and state violence combine not only to solidify Kenyan ideas of youth subordination, but also to create situations of looping violence that include ongoing police violence. To sustain such violence, the state embeds itself in the informal and instrumentalises existing gerontocratic power structures to gain tenuous forms of social support for its violence within the very communities targeted by that violence. In response, as the violence becomes entwined with youth livelihoods, youth draw on those very systems of violence to negotiate life in Mathare and to create subtle counter-systems and imaginaries, both social and political.