Samar Al-Bulushi’s War-Making as Worldmaking is a conceptually ambitious and deeply grounded ethnography of Kenya’s entanglement in the global war on terror. The book tells two interrelated stories. The first, a macro-level analysis, challenges portrayals of African states as passive recipients of Western militarism, showing how Kenya has become an active co-author of global security projects. The second, more micro in scale, centers on how Kenyan Muslims experience, navigate, and survive the everyday violence of militarized governance. These two stories – one about state complicity and geopolitical aspiration, the other about embodied survival and everyday worldmaking – challenge conventional understandings of war, sovereignty, and political agency in East Africa.
The first story traces Kenya’s evolving role in the global security order. Al-Bulushi shows how, following the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings and the rise of Al-Shabaab, Kenya deepened its military and intelligence partnerships with the United States. Through its 2011 invasion of Somalia, participation in AFRICOM, and expansion of domestic security powers, Kenya has recast itself as a regional security anchor. In this story, Kenya’s military posture becomes a performance of modernity and global belonging, while projecting ‘an image of strength and virility at home and abroad’ (p. 25). This is war-making as a political and cultural project: a means by which Kenya negotiates its place in the world, even as it reinforces exclusionary citizenship and deepens debt dependency.
In telling this first story, Al-Bulushi calls for a decolonized approach to world politics – one that pluralizes subjects of inquiry and refuses to reduce African dynamics to Western interests (p. 8). She introduces the concept of ‘elastic empire’ (p. 88) to describe a fluid, often obscured structure in which war is outsourced, co-produced, and made respectable through African actors. This framing challenges narratives of unilateral imperial domination, showing how African states help shape the architecture of global militarism.
The second story unfolds through Al-Bulushi’s attention to the lives of those targeted by this security apparatus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Mombasa and Nairobi, she explores how Kenyan Muslims live ‘in a place that is not understood to be a site of war yet is often experienced as such by its targets’ (p. 4). Here, the war’s effects are ‘structural, incremental, and often invisible,’ but no less brutal. Al-Bulushi moves beyond accounts of victimhood to focus on how people interpret, endure, and respond to these conditions. These everyday negotiations, she argues, are acts of worldmaking – practices through which people navigate uncertainty, assert meaning, and contest the boundaries of belonging.
Each chapter develops these themes through distinct empirical and conceptual lenses. Chapter 1 examines how Kenya’s intervention in Somalia and the 2013 Westgate Mall attack helped shape a militarized national identity, exploring how support for the war on terror has been cultivated through symbolic and emotional appeals to unity, security, and modernity. Chapter 2 turns to the Kenyan coast, where the war on terror reactivates colonial distinctions between natives and non-natives, positioning coastal Muslims as foreign and suspect. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of ‘phantom epistemologies’ to describe how rumors, gut feelings, and whispered warnings serve as embodied strategies of survival amid opaque and often supranational security forces. Chapter 4 brings the war into the domestic sphere, showing how homes become extensions of the security apparatus and destabilizing the public–private divide. Chapter 5, which highlights the role of friendship, explores how the state and international donors frame young Muslim men as threats – figures to be monitored, rehabilitated, and disciplined. Al-Bulushi shows how donor-funded programs aimed at promoting ‘resilience’ and ‘peace’ often pathologize dissent and extend military governance under humanitarian cover.
The interplay between the global and the everyday is one of the book’s greatest strengths. If the book has a limitation, it lies in the occasional disconnect between its two narrative threads. The geopolitical analysis is conceptually rich, but at times it feels only loosely tethered to the micro-level stories and ethnographic accounts. The text occasionally jumps between theoretical interventions and on-the-ground narratives in ways that can feel disjointed. Likewise, the coastal specificity of some chapters raises questions about how broadly these dynamics apply across Kenya or in other African contexts. Still, these are relatively minor concerns in an otherwise compelling and important work.
War-Making as Worldmaking is a vital contribution to African and Indian Ocean studies, critical security studies, and the anthropology of empire. It offers a powerful account of how war is enacted through partnership, aspiration, and everyday life – and of how people caught within its logic continue, nonetheless, to imagine and remake their worlds.
