In the Horn of Africa, states are tapping into ‘new frontier’ discourses to design and promote high-modernist visions that link exploitation of minerals, physical infrastructure development and agro-commercialization in previously neglected regions. Kenya’s Lamu Port and South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (Corridor) project, or LAPSSET, which will run from Kenya’s marginalized northern coast, and through its equally marginalized northern region, presents such a vision. This paper shows that LAPSSET’s new beguiling discourse about the ‘empty’, ‘unexploited’ and ‘backward’ frontier that it seeks to transform is being complicated by a series of complex and unintended local responses along the proposed corridor driven by local histories. These responses reveal the limited power of Kenya’s executive-bureaucratic state in its attempts at implementing its visions for the ‘frontiers’. In contrast, existing analysis contends that state transformative agendas usually extend state power in areas where such power was previously weak or non-existent. Drawing on preliminary evidence from Lamu county, where the LAPSSET corridor is set to begin, this paper submits that a lack of involvement of local actors and communities in project implementation along the corridor – given the waning authority of Kenya’s formerly centralized state – will lead to disastrous consequences, creating risks to communities and to the project itself.