As Kenya prepares for its next general election, due in less than 20 months’ time, 2026 will prove to be a critical year. With local and global restraints on political violence being hollowed out at the very time when trust in the credibility of the election system is at an all-time low, serious trouble beckons unless urgent steps are taken.

Violence in Kenyan elections is rarely the product of that perennial bogeyman, tribalism. It is almost exclusively a state-generated phenomenon that requires a particular alignment of circumstances. Two matter above all else: first, whether the election itself is credible; second, whether the incumbent is running for re-election.

Since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1991, Kenya has had seven competitive presidential elections. It was only in four of them that significant violence was witnessed; in all four, the inevitably unpopular incumbent was running. In 2002, 2013 and 2022, when no incumbent was on the ballot, violence was comparatively muted, even where the credibility of the election itself was contested.

The lesson is clear. It is the efforts to improve the credibility of the election and to enforce institutional restraints on state actors that are the best safeguard.

Kenya has come some way in this regard since the conflagration that followed the disputed 2007 election. The 2010 constitution introduced checks on the wanton exercise of state power, most importantly an independent judiciary, which has proven a credible venue for settling election disputes. Reforms to the election system to enhance transparency, most evident in the 2022 elections, have also taken some of the sting out of the polls.

Today, however, that progress is at risk. And President William Ruto is running for re-election.

Following a long delay, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) was reconstituted in July last year, albeit not without controversy following the president’s initial decision to ignore a court order stopping the appointment of commissioners following a legal challenge to their suitability.

That stained the commission’s credibility from the very start. The shambolic and violent by-elections for dozens of empty seats of senators and national assembly members, which took place in November, further damaged public confidence in the commission as an independent referee. This needs urgent addressing.

But the credibility of the election is down to more than just the IEBC. The Kenyan media has an especially important role to play. For years, out of fear of antagonising those in power, major media houses have treated the announcement of vote tallies as an official function best left to electoral bodies. That timidity has repeatedly undermined public confidence in election outcomes.

The 2022 election was a missed opportunity. Even with polling-station results publicly available, Kenyan media appeared unable – or unwilling – to independently aggregate figures and explain what the numbers were saying in real time. In 2027, the media cannot continue to ignore its responsibilities. There is time to collaborate, rebuild capacity and invest in data journalism. They should prepare to independently verify results and call the election, even when that makes power uncomfortable.

Media weakness is also increasingly being exploited through online disinformation. And the tools are becoming far more powerful. Kenya is no stranger to election manipulation in the digital age. It was one of the testing grounds for Cambridge Analytica, whose microtargeting operations during the 2013 election helped normalise data-driven psychological campaigning long before the scandal broke globally.

Today, artificial intelligence raises the stakes dramatically. AI-driven disinformation can flood platforms with synthetic content, fabricate audio and video, impersonate trusted voices, and target communities with tailored narratives at speed and scale.

In environments where trust in institutions is already thin, disinformation does not merely mislead. It can destabilise. It can delegitimise results before votes are cast, provoke panic or mobilisation based on false claims, and provide justification for repression in the name of preserving public order. A strong, capable, reliable and effective media will be crucial in mitigating such impacts.

Regional and international institutions and pressures have also been critical in containing the violent appetites of Kenyan elites, but these are now in decay. Today’s global environment makes such restraint far less likely. Across East Africa, governments are normalising repression as elections approach. In neighbouring Tanzania and Uganda, authorities have acted with impunity to suppress dissent and election protests.

And this regional shift is occurring alongside a broader collapse in global accountability. Western backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has accelerated the erosion of international norms, undermined institutions such as the International Criminal Court, and created a permissive environment for malevolent actors.

Given these circumstances, Kenya must focus on shoring up its internal defences. Time is running out to insist on reforms to insulate independent state institutions from political interference. Though the Kriegler Commission, set up in the aftermath of the 2007/8 election, recommended that any changes to election rules should be concluded at least two years before the polls, we are already past that deadline.

Still, 2026 presents an opportunity to rebuild the coalitions that can mobilise citizen action as a bulwark against state repression. In the 1990s, these included civil society organisations, the church and the media.

The Gen Z protests showed that Kenyan youth can also be a potent political force and it is likely that we will see them out on the streets yet again this year. The question is whether their elders will join them in standing up against state machinations.

Violence next year is not inevitable. But preventing it requires urgent action to protect the gains in electoral transparency and mobilise popular action as a shield against abuse of state power.

The clock is ticking.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Ukraine has condemned a fresh wave of Russian strikes overnight which killed one person and injured 23 others, as talks with the US aimed at ending the war are set to resume.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the “brutal” attack – “cynically” ordered by Russian leader Vladimir Putin – had “hit not only our people, but also the negotiation table”.

Delegations from Russia, Ukraine and the US have been meeting in Abu Dhabi for the first trilateral talks since the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in 2022.

A source told the BBC that some progress had been made but the key issue of territory remains unresolved.

The mayor of Ukrainian capital Kyiv said one person had died and four had been wounded while Kharkiv’s mayor reported that 19 people had been hurt during a sustained assault on the city in the early hours of Saturday morning.

On the second day of the three-way talks in Abu Dhabi, Sybiha said the “barbaric” overnight assault proved “that Putin’s place is not at the board of peace, but at the dock of the special tribunal”.

US President Donald Trump said last week that Putin had accepted an invitation to join his ‘Board of Peace’ – an organisation focused on ending global conflicts. Putin has not confirmed this.

Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram that three of the four people who had been injured had been hospitalised.

He added that the capital’s critical infrastructure had been damaged, leaving 6,000 buildings without heating.

Temperatures have fallen to around -12C in parts of Ukraine, according to the Met Office. In a statement following the assaults, President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “The main target of the Russians was the energy infrastructure.”

Last week, Russia attacked Kyiv’s power infrastructure, forcing Zelensky to initially call off his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In Kharkiv, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 19 people had been injured during the strikes in the early hours of Saturday morning. A maternity hospital and a hostel for displaced people were damaged.

Russia occupies roughly 20% of Ukraine, including parts of the eastern Donbas region. The Kremlin wants Ukraine to hand over large areas of the territory, but Ukraine has ruled this out.

In Davos, Zelensky said: “It’s all about the land. This is the issue which is not solved yet.”

He said that he had reached an agreement with Trump on future US security guarantees for Ukraine in the event of a deal.

He gave no detail but said it would need to go before US Congress and the Ukrainian parliament before signing.

The day before the talks in Abu Dhabi began, US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Putin in Moscow, which the Russian president described as “useful”.

Following the first day of talks, Rustem Umerov, who is leading the Ukrainian delegation, said on social media: “The meeting focused on the parameters for ending Russia’s war and the further logic of the negotiation process aimed at advancing toward a dignified and lasting peace.”

More than a dozen states sound the alarm, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.

More than 8,000 flights set to take off over the weekend have been cancelled as a major storm bears down across the United States, threatening widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.

At least 3,400 flights were delayed or cancelled on Saturday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, and more than 5,000 were called off for Sunday.

Roughly 140 million people from New Mexico to New England were under a winter storm warning, as forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.

Snow fell ‍over parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas on ‍Friday ahead of a winter storm expected to converge with bitter Arctic cold and engulf much of the US over the weekend.

“This is a mean storm,” Jacob Asherman, a meteorologist at the US Weather Prediction Center in Maryland, told Reuters news agency. He said it was the biggest so far this ​season in terms of intensity and scope.

Life-threatening wind-chill readings had plunged to below minus 45 degrees Celsius (minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Dakotas and Minnesota. The meteorologist warned that exposure to such cold without proper clothing “can lead to hypothermia very, very quickly”.

The ‍worst was predicted for parts ⁠of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, where ice up to an inch thick was likely to coat tree limbs, power lines and roadways, Asherman said.

Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told residents on X that the state Department of Transportation was pretreating the roads and urged residents to “stay home if possible”.

Utility companies braced for power outages because ice-coated trees and power lines can keep falling long after a storm has passed.

President Donald Trump said via social media on Friday that his administration was coordinating with state and local officials and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was “fully prepared to respond”.

The storm represents the ‍first major test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office just weeks ago.

He told local news station NY1 on Friday that the city’s sanitation workforce would transform into “the nation’s largest snow-fighting operation” in advance of the heavy snowfall expected on Sunday.

China is no longer the top security priority for the US, according to the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy.

The document, published once every four years, instead says that the security of the US homeland and Western Hemisphere is the department’s chief concern, adding that Washington has long neglected the “concrete interests” of Americans.

The Pentagon also says it will offer “more limited” support to US allies.

It follows the publication last year of the US National Security Strategy, which said that Europe faced “civilizational collapse” and did not cast Russia as a threat to the US. At the time, Moscow said the document was “largely consistent” with its vision.

By comparison, the 2022 National Defense Strategy named the “multi-domain threat” posed by China as its top defence priority. In 2018, the document described “revisionist powers”, such as China and Russia, as the “central challenge” to US security.

The 34-page document, released on Friday, largely reinforces policy positions staked out by the Trump administration over its first year back in office.

In that time, US President Donald Trump has seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, carried out strikes against alleged drug boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean, and more recently, applied pressure on US allies to acquire Greenland.

The strategy reiterated that the Pentagon “will guarantee US military and commercial access to key terrain, especially the Panama Canal, Gulf of America, and Greenland”.

The document also says the Trump administration’s approach will be “fundamentally different from the grandiose strategies of the past post–Cold War administrations”.

It adds: “Out with utopian idealism; in with hardnosed realism.”

Relations with China are to be approached through “strength, not confrontation”. The goal “is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them”, the document says.

Unlike in previous versions of the strategy, Taiwan, the self-governing island claimed by China, is not mentioned. However, the document does write that the US aims to “prevent anyone, including China, from being able to dominate us or our allies”.

Late last year, the US announced a vast arms sale to Taiwan worth $11bn (£8.2bn), leading China to hold military drills around the island in response.

The strategy also calls for greater “burden-sharing” from US allies, saying that partners have been “content” to let Washington “subsidize their defense”.

Though, it denies this demonstrates a move towards “isolationism”.

“To the contrary, it means a focused and genuinely strategic approach to the threats our nation faces,” it says, adding that it does not want to conflate American interests “with those of the rest of the world – that a threat to a person halfway around the world is the same as to an American.”

Instead, it says allies, especially Europe, “will take the lead against threats that are less severe for us but more so for them”.

Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, is described as a “persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members”.

The strategy also outlines a “more limited” role for US deterrence of North Korea. South Korea is “capable of taking primary responsibility” for the task, it adds.

In a speech made at the World Economic Forum earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the old world order is “not coming back” and urged fellow middle powers – like South Korea, Canada and Australia – to come together.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said at the Davos meeting.

That came as French President Emmanuel Macron also warned of a “shift towards a world without rules”.