Since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, the US military has presided over an unprecedented escalation of drone strikes in Somalia, with over 110 bombings in 2025 alone. During the same period, the Somali refugee population in the USA has been in the national spotlight, both as targets of ICE raids and as the recipients of xenophobic vitriol from Trump, who has referred to Somalis as ‘garbage’ and as undeserving of refuge. These intersecting dynamics of racialized policing at home and drone warfare abroad make Maxamed Abumaye’s Black Muslim Refugee an especially timely and important intervention.

In his book, Abumaye foregrounds the figure of the Somali refugee to highlight the connection between US militarism in Somalia and police violence in the USA. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, he traces Somali refugees’ experiences of state violence from the Somali civil war to the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya to their eventual resettlement in San Diego. In doing so, he problematizes mainstream narratives that portray the USA as a benign, humanitarian recipient of refugees, instead showing that ‘we are here because you were there’ (p. 3) – that is, the US military played a direct role in fuelling the violence that contributed to the displacement of millions of Somalis in the past three decades, dating back to the 1992 US military invasion (the focus of Chapter 1).

One of the unique aspects of this intervention is Abumaye’s use of auto-ethnography. Drawing on his own family’s history of displacement from Somalia, temporary resettlement in Kenya and eventual migration to the USA, he skilfully interweaves his personal narrative with an analysis of the structural forces at play. The book is written in a clear, accessible style that is suitable for undergraduates and graduate courses in African studies, Black studies, critical refugee studies and anthropology.

Alongside the policing–militarism continuum, Abumaye employs the dual lenses of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, asking how North American scholars might expand our theorizations of race and empire by putting the lived experiences of US-based Black Muslim refugees at the centre of our analysis. Specifically, he observes that US-based Black studies scholars’ tendency to focus on the transatlantic slave trade obscures how ‘US imperialism and colonialism continue to produce the dispersal of Black people’ (p. 13). He argues that the growing presence of African immigrants in the USA compels us to wrestle with the significance of US imperialism ‘in shaping contemporary Black life in the United States and in the global Black diaspora’ (p. 14). At the same time, Abumaye aims to enrich scholarly discussions of Islamophobia in the USA by expanding the lens beyond the more common focus on Arab and South Asian Muslims to encompass African Muslims. Thinking at the intersection of Islamophobia and anti-blackness, he examines the multiple, overlapping processes of racialization that structure the lives of Somali refugees.

While capturing the effects of state violence on everyday people, Abumaye is adamant that his interlocutors are not merely victims but active agents of resistance and survival, whether in the context of their time in Kenya (which is home to the largest Somali refugee population) or in the USA. Chapter 2, for example, describes how Somali refugees living in Dadaab refugee camp shared information about upcoming police raids. Writing against the Kenyan state’s self-proclaimed role as a source of safe refuge, he illustrates the ways in which the camp operates as a carceral space, segregated from Kenyan society and governed by severe restrictions on refugee mobility. Despite the bleakness of the camp, however, he draws on his own childhood memories living in Dadaab, writing that ‘we found ways to experience joy’ (p. 59). As Abumaye explains, refugees developed creative strategies to exchange information, share food and provide shelter, all of which constituted life-sustaining mutual aid practices that they then brought with them when they migrated to the USA, where many have become participants and leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Abumaye’s fine-grained ethnography offers us a vital alternative historical record of the so-called War on Terror, one that decentres the abstracted knowledge of security experts in favour of the embodied knowledge formations of those who are caught in the crosshairs. It also serves as a reminder of relational histories, bringing into view the entanglements between East Africa and the US empire that have resulted in the growing presence of Somalis in the USA today. There is tremendous power in highlighting these connections, as it is precisely histories of mobility, encounter and exchange that have planted the seeds for bonds of solidarity across continents, with the potential to collectively imagine more just and peaceful futures.