NOTE: This episode is an audio version of our video interview “Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror: An Interview with Samar Al-Bulushi” from May 22, 2025. ⁠Click here to watch the original video⁠.

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Security in Context's Anita Fuentes interviews Samar Al-Bulushi about her book, "War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror."

Samar Al-Bulushi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology at Yale and her MA in International Affairs at Columbia University. Prior to obtaining her PhD, she spent ten years working in the field of international human rights with the Center for Economic and Social Rights, Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She is currently a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, D.C., and previously served as contributing editor for Africa is a Country.

Al-Bulushi’s research is broadly concerned with militarism and geopolitics.  Her book, War-Making as World-Making: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (forthcoming with Stanford University Press), argues that Kenya has emerged as a key player in the post 9/11 era of endless war. Her next project, The Afterlives of Non-Alignment, explores how Africans re-engage with the concept of non-alignment in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While contemporary invocations of non-alignment are not necessarily grounded in a commitment to anti-imperialism, memories of European colonialism loom large, as do memories of the Soviet Union’s support for African independence struggles. This project aims to shed ethnographic light on how asymmetrical yet shifting global power relations are interpreted and contested, shaped simultaneously by colonial legacies of exploitation and inequality, by affective discourses that invoke memories of these legacies, and by everyday forms of geopolitical knowledge.

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