In her new book War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press), UC Irvine anthropology assistant professor Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa. The work takes a hard look at how U.S. security assistance emboldened the Kenyan state to invade Somalia, and to deploy heavy-handed police tactics at home. Below, she discusses the far-reaching consequences and global stakes.

Q: War-Making as Worldmaking examines Kenya's involvement in the "War on Terror" and its partnership with the U.S. How has this provided a platform for Kenya to emerge as a Global South state with growing international visibility on questions of security?

A: Since the launch of the US-led war on terror, governments across the world have taken advantage of the US government’s fixation with ‘security’ to pursue their own strategic interests. This has been especially true of key partner states like Kenya, which is among the top recipients of US security assistance on the African continent. As I argue in the book, this has emboldened the Kenyan state to perform and enact its power in new ways. In October 2011, for example, the Kenyan military dispatched thousands of troops across the border into Somalia in the name of quelling the threat posed by the Somali militant group al-Shabaab. The invasion of Somalia signaled an unprecedented shift towards a more aggressive foreign policy. As I explain in the book, Kenya’s growing assertiveness on security matters has coincided with the US government’s wariness of the costs associated with its own direct intervention.  This convergence of interests between the two countries has created an opening for the US to train and equip Kenyan security forces, and for Kenya to expand its policing and war-making capabilities at home and abroad, with dire consequences for Muslim populations in the region. Kenya’s recent decision to lead a multinational police intervention in Haiti is yet another example of its growing entanglement in the politics of empire and militarized interventionism.

Q: Why is it important to recognize the agency of Global South states beyond Euro-American influence?

A: There is a lingering tendency to dismiss the agency of Global South leaders—particularly in the context of the war on terror—largely due to the power imbalances that shape security partnerships with the United States. It is important to acknowledge these power imbalances because they are real. The fact that Kenya’s national debt has multiplied fivefold since 2013 means that its decision-making has inevitably been shaped by considerations about access to credit. However, I show that Kenya’s growing assertiveness on matters of security is not only a political-economic calculation but equally a universalist claim and aspiration of belonging to the ‘civilized’ world. In this context, Kenyan leaders have gone to great lengths to convince Kenyan citizens that the war on terror is “our” war—one that Africans have a responsibility to fight. In doing so, the government has worked to culturally conscript Kenyans into the project of war and empire—knowing that popular consent is vital to the war-making endeavor. Yet the ongoing inclination to confine our analysis of African politics to the boundaries of the African continent means that we have few analytical tools to wrestle with the world-making implications of these dynamics.

Q: In what ways does the history of British settler colonialism inform the Kenyan state’s actions today?

A: As the historian E.S. Atieno Odhiambo has illustrated, the political elite in Kenya inherited the British colonial fetishization of law and order. Kenya was a settler colony, meaning that the colonial government engaged in large scale land dispossession to facilitate white settlement. British leaders framed challenges to their rule through the lens of criminality in order to justify punitive measures and the policing of dissent. Alongside the police, the British relied on a series of spatial management techniques that reified distinctions along racial lines. There is therefore a longer history of governing strategies that are informed by racialized notions of suspicion, and that have blurred the boundaries between civilian and military power — from the British colonial crackdown on the anti-colonial Land and Freedom Army (popularly referred to as ‘Mau Mau’) to the newly independent Kenyan state’s attempts to quell a secessionist movement led by ethnic Somalis in northeastern Kenya. The Kenyan government’s framing of the ‘Shifta War’ in the 1960s as a conflict between the purportedly lawful state on the one hand, and ‘lawless’ rebels on the other, allowed it to justify the collective punishment of ethnic Somalis. In many ways, this marked the beginnings of popular anxiety around borders and the cultivation of suspicion towards Somalis as internal strangers. This history is integral to our ability to appreciate how Somalis in particular have long been racialized as threatening — making them an obvious enemy against which the Kenyan state, decades later, has constituted itself once again.

Q: You argue that we need to look beyond the geographies of officially declared war zones like Iraq & Afghanistan to adequately grapple with the human impact of the war on terror in places like Kenya. Can you describe how people have been affected there?

A: I focus specifically on US-trained Kenyan police units that have been granted the license to engage in offensive operations including renditions, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, primarily targeting members of Kenya’s Muslim minority population. This has fundamentally destabilized everyday life for this segment of the population, creating a climate of crippling fear and uncertainty. I explore how human rights activists and family members of those people who have been directly affected work to document and challenge these forms of state terror that have been legitimized in the name of ‘security.’ In doing so, my hope is to show that this is not simply a story of violence and devastation. Ethnographic attention to people’s daily realities reveals a contested social and political field in which people congregate in courthouses, police stations, living rooms, and street corners to inquire about and piece together information about friends, neighbors, and family members who have been targeted by the police. What emerges is an enlivened landscape where people come together in their search for loved ones, and in doing so, exhibit a will to life. It is this dynamism and spirit of solidarity that I hope to convey, because this opens up possibilities to imagine new, more peaceful worlds.