This article situates the shooting of white Kenyan landowner Kuki Gallmann within recent critiques of community-based conservation and the politics of whiteness in Kenya. I discuss how conservation has enabled white landowners to consolidate their influence over Laikipia County, as well as neighboring regions of Kenya via an organization called the Northern Rangelands Trust. The NRT is feared to be undermining regional livestock economies, while contributing to land shortages that have precipitated violence in Laikipia. I argue that the pastoralists implicated in these conflicts are subject to a maelstrom of livelihood stressors, some of which are aggravated by the efforts of white Kenyans to expand conservation throughout northern Kenya.
