What does it mean to wage war in a place that is not officially at war?

For two decades, the United States has conducted counterterrorism operations across Africa—not through full-scale invasions, but through drone strikes, surveillance, renditions, and the training of local forces. Kenya has been a central partner. It hosts four US military bases, including Manda Bay, a launchpad for drone strikes in #Somalia and #Yemen, and receives hundreds of millions of dollars in counterterrorism support.

But what does this partnership actually look like on the ground? How does it reshape Kenyan society, politics, and everyday life? And who bears the cost?

Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi’s book War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror takes us inside this question. It is an ethnography of the war on terror as it is lived in Kenya—not just by its targets, but by the middle-class professionals, activists, journalists, and security officials who navigate its contradictions.

Al-Bulushi argues that the war on terror is not simply something the United States does to Africa. The book “questions traditional conceptualizations of empire as a unidirectional imposition of power,” she writes, and instead reads empire otherwise, as “a story of multiple plots in small places.” Kenyan actors—politicians, military officials, civil society leaders—are not just following orders. They are actively shaping the war on terror, sometimes for their own purposes.

She traces the colonial roots of Kenya's counterinsurgency state back to the British suppression of the Mau Mau and the Shifta War of the 1960s. She shows how the war on terror has reshaped the home, the family, the mosque, and gender relations—how bodies and spaces previously coded as private or feminine are increasingly targeted, whether through police raids or through calls for mothers to monitor their children for signs of extremism. And she examines how race is refashioned through warfare, as Kenya claims an exceptional Blackness on the world stage while Muslim Kenyans are racialized as foreign and suspect.

In this conversation, we discuss:
What “worldmaking” means, and why she insists on a more sober accounting of worldmaking from the Global South
The “murky middle” of activists, journalists, and professionals who reproduce power as much as they challenge it
Why the war on terror is waged on gendered terrain, and how the home became a site of geopolitical concern
What “phantom epistemologies” reveal about imperial power—and why we should embrace uncertainty
What it means that Kenya invoked Pan-Africanism to justify sending police to Haiti
How her book helps us understand imperialism not as a one-way imposition of power, but as a set of relationships the US cannot sustain without African partners

Dr. Al-Bulushi is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Before her academic career, she spent ten years in the field of international human rights. Her writing has appeared in Pambazuka News, Africa Is a Country, Teen Vogue, and The Intercept.
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00:00 - Introduction: Waging war in a place not officially at war
08:25 - Her father's deportation: race, belonging, and the security state
15:56 - "War-making as worldmaking": what the title means
20:21 - Kenya is not a proxy: how Kenyan actors shaped the war on terror
27:42 - What the US wanted, and what it didn't get
33:03 - The "murky middle": activists, journalists, and the aid apparatus
43:11 - Race and racial capitalism in the war on terror
51:21 - Gender, mothers, and the home as a site of geopolitical concern
1:00:04 - Phantom epistemologies and the opacity of imperial power
1:06:26 - Pan-Africanism, Haiti, and how imperialism actually works

Pambazuka. Anti-Imperialism. Pan-Africanism. Liberation.
#Kenya #WarOnTerror #PanAfricanism #Imperialism #Pambazuka #AfricanStudies #USForeignPolicy #RacialCapitalism