About

Samar Al-Bulushi

Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine

Research Interests

Geopolitics; imperialism; militarism; policing; race; Kenya, East Africa, elites, diplomacy; transnationalism & South-South solidarities.

Current Research

My first book War-Making as World-Making: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024), explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. I argue that Kenya’s emergence as a key player in the so-called “war on terror” is closely linked—but not reducible —to the U.S. military’s growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war.  Attending to the cultural politics of security, I illustrate that Kenya’s war against the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab has become a means to assert itself as a leader on questions of security.  Meanwhile, the Kenyan government’s alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of Kenyan Muslims. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Kenyan cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, the book brings into focus a landscape of everyday life that remains largely overlooked by those documenting the costs of post 9/11 imperial warfare in Africa.

My next project, The Afterlives of Non-Alignment, wrestles with the tensions and contradictions of South-South solidarities in the twenty-first century. While recent invocations of non-alignment (as seen in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) are not necessarily grounded in a shared commitment to anti-imperialism, we are nonetheless witnessing a more assertive Global South-led geopolitics. With a primary focus on political leaders, intellectuals, and activists across the African continent and beyond, I am interested in 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.

Professional Background

I joined the Department of Anthropology in 2019. Between 2017-2019, I was  a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCI.

Prior to pursuing my PhD, I worked for a number of international human rights organizations, including the Center for Economic and Social Rights, Parliamentarians for Global Action, and the International Center for Transitional Justice. I was also a co-producer and co-host of Afrobeat Radio and Global Movements, Urban Struggles at WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York City.

I am a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and previously served as a contributing editor at Africa is a Country. I have published in a variety of public outlets on topics ranging from the International Criminal Court to the militarization of U.S. policy in Africa.

Education

B.A., Political Science, Columbia University

M.A., International Affairs, Columbia University

Ph.D. Sociocultural Anthropology, Yale University