Sunday 9 February 2025
When Kenyan president William Ruto stood alongside US president Joe Biden during a press conference in Washington in May, he likely saw it as his opportunity to shine, being the only African leader to be extended a visit to the White House during the Biden administration. Kenya had just stepped onto the global stage, anticipating designation as a major non-Nato ally by the US. The country had also decided to send a contingent of its police officers to Haiti in an effort to restore order to the capital, Port-au-Prince. Ruto was cosplaying as a global leader, bearing his share of the responsibility in addressing the world’s challenges.
Ayub Abdikadir, a journalist from Kenya who travelled with Ruto’s delegation to report on the visit, made sure it wouldn’t be such an easy victory lap. “Can you explain the geopolitical goal, 12,000 km away from Nairobi?” Abdikadir asked, perplexed about why it was Kenya’s duty to help a country a stone’s throw from the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation. “Isn’t it an irony when you are putting a fire in a faraway neighbour’s home, when our own home is on fire?” Ruto evidently did not have a prepared response and squirmed, forcing out an incoherent reply filled with the kind of platitudes typically heard from US presidents about their important role in the world—though, for some reason, they made less sense coming from him.
The moment highlighted an important tension between the role Kenya was auditioning for as a key pillar in the US-led world order and the sacrifices and costs this would entail, given its own significant challenges at home. It also showed how Kenya’s attempts to insert itself into global issues often meant buttressing broader US goals.
Kenya’s post-colonial elites have long sought to curry favour with western powers, often to the nation’s detriment and at times directly endangering its marginalised populations. Samar al-Bulushi’s new book, War-Making as Worldmaking, explores this further, bringing her anthropological training to bear on how the so-called War on Terror was made Kenya’s war under similar circumstances. The US declared the WoT a global conflict, conscripting and enlisting countries worldwide, with Kenya emerging as an enthusiastic participant. Professor al-Bulushi’s book uses this episode to shed light on the Kenyan state’s historical role in the operations of first the British and then the American empires, and how this influenced its relationships with its own Muslim populations.
Samar al-Bulushi: When I first began research on this topic, my hope was to shed light on a region of the world that has remained largely overlooked by scholars studying the human costs of the so-called war on terror. The fact that I have family ties to East Africa definitely shaped my desire to learn more, and the stories I heard from many of my Muslim interlocutors resonated with the story my father had shared with me of his own experience of harassment back in the 1970’s. When one is personally invested in the research as I am, I feel a strong sense of responsibility and accountability to the people that were kind enough to share their stories with me. I never took this for granted, particularly because research itself can be a form of unwelcome surveillance, and I was painfully aware that many of my interlocutors already experience considerable surveillance in their daily lives.
SB: 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 security 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 signalled an unprecedented shift towards a more aggressive foreign policy. It is important to note that Kenya’s assertiveness on regional security matters has coincided with the US military’s determination to maintain only a “light footprint” on the continent. 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. In the book, I focus specifically on US-trained Kenyan police units that have been granted the licence to engage in offensive operations including renditions, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, primarily targeting members of Kenya’s Muslim minority population. This has created a climate of fear and exacerbated longstanding tensions and lack of trust between Muslims and the Kenyan state.
SB: The ability of the Kenyan state to cultivate popular support to fight “terrorism” predates the post-9/11 war on terror. As the historian E.S. Atieno Odhiambo has illustrated, the political elite in Kenya inherited the British colonial fetishisation of law and order. With this in mind, it is not entirely surprising to learn that there is a longer history of governing strategies informed by racialised 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 have long been racialised as threatening — making them an obvious enemy against which the Kenyan state, decades later, has constituted itself once again.
SB: 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. But 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 ‘civilised’ 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 endeavour. 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.
SB: While I certainly want readers to learn about the human impact of the war on terror in east Africa, this comes with the risk of painting a picture of a place that is singularly defined by imperial violence. This is simply not the case, and even in the most oppressive circumstances, it is possible to find examples of the limitations of imperial power. Ethnographic attention to people’s daily realities reveals a highly 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 US-trained police units. What emerges is a real place with real people who 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.
SB: In Kenya, the rise of “countering violent extremism” or CVE as a form of soft power has coincided with the championing of pluralism and inclusion–specifically that Kenyan Muslims under the revised 2010 Constitution now (in theory) have more human rights protections and therefore experience a greater sense of belonging and inclusion. But NGOs in Kenya have learned that it is only by embracing the CVE agenda set by donor governments like the United States that they can gain access to much needed funding.
And it is in this context that the domain of civil society has become a sphere of heightened surveillance, because Kenyan citizens–under the banner of CVE–are encouraged to monitor and surveil one another for signs of ‘extremism.’ In effect, equal citizenship is now conditioned on a willingness to participate in the project of security and the war on terror. To raise questions or to challenge the very premise of the war on terror is to invite suspicion and scrutiny, which means there is rapidly shrinking space for discussion and debate in a country that claims to be a democracy.
SB: In the book, I explain that the Rwandan genocide was a turning point for African states, as a collective sense of guilt led a growing number of leaders to believe that they had a responsibility to intervene in such scenarios. Historically, African states have been wary of interfering in the affairs of other states—in part because they worried that this could open the door to neocolonialism and interference from global powers. After the genocide in Rwanda, this changed, and African leaders were among a growing number of leaders worldwide who came to support the UN concept known as “the responsibility to protect.”
While the principle of helping others in distress is a good one, the tendency is to do so in the form of a militarised intervention, which often has the effect of exacerbating violence and harm. We need alternatives to these approaches and need to focus on political rather than military solutions.
SB: Discourses about “violent extremism” in Kenya are both gendered and racialised, focusing primarily on young Muslim men. There is an underlying assumption that young Muslim men’s lives are governed predominantly by political or economic interests that take shape in the public sphere. This is simply not true, and I believe that it is important for scholars to challenge this assumption by exploring the domain of friendship. In addition to offering forms of emotional support and guidance, friendships provide a space for reflection, humour, affirmation, and self-invention. By placing friendship at the centre of my analysis, my hope was to challenge mainstream representations that reproduce one-dimensional narratives about young Muslim men. And by highlighting the significance of jokes and humour, I show how young men are able to process their experiences of surveillance and criminalisation, and to redefine themselves as they chart new possibilities for the future.