Introduction Excerpt for War-Making as Worldmaking

INTRODUCTION

IN JANUARY 2007, Abdul and Zaina were stopped at the Kenya–Somalia border as they attempted to cross back into Kenya.¹ Like hundreds of others, they were fleeing the violence that ensued in the wake of the US–backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia the month before. Although they could not have known it at the time, they stumbled directly into a transnational border operation in which Ethiopian and Somali ground troops, with American air support, were channeling all those fleeing the war zone toward an area of the border where many would then be captured.²

Zaina, a Tanzanian citizen from the town of Moshi, had moved to the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa a few years earlier to be with Abdul after they married. Abdul ran a mobile phone repair shop in Mombasa, but his business was struggling. The pair decided to relocate to Mogadishu in 2006 with hopes of finding a more stable source of income. At the time, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) had brought a degree of stability to Somalia when it took control of large parts of the country. But everything changed at the end of the year when foreign powers invaded, dislodged the ICU, and imposed a new government.

At the border, the two were separated and interrogated about Abdul’s alleged connections to Al-Qaeda. Kenyan authorities seized Abdul’s Kenyan passport and ID card, claiming he was on a “most wanted” list of terror suspects, and transported him to Nairobi where he was detained for weeks without charge or trial. Zaina was held at the border for ten days along with other women and children before she was taken to Nairobi. As Abdul was shuffled between different police stations, he was interrogated, tortured, and denied the opportunity to communicate with family members or a lawyer. Kenyan authorities doubted his documented ties to his homeland, arguing that the lack of public outcry about his arrest suggested that he was not in fact a Kenyan citizen.

At least 150 men, women, and children from nineteen countries were arrested at the Kenya–Somalia border that month. Abdul and Zaina were among the roughly eighty-five people who were eventually transported from Kenya to Somalia and Ethiopia in the first publicly documented instances of mass “renditions” (or government-sponsored abductions) in Africa.³

Among friends and family members of each of the detainees, the stories that circulated made painfully clear the dangers of being a traveling Muslim in the world today, even in a region characterized by longstanding kinship ties and trade practices defined by cross-border mobility. Abducted from their police cells in the middle of the night, the detainees were flown, blindfolded and handcuffed, on three different privately chartered flights to Baidoa and Mogadishu, and then transferred to prisons in Addis Ababa where officials from the FBI awaited them.⁴ Upon her release, Zaina recounted the details of their transfer from Nairobi to a local human rights organization:

It was so chilly and drizzling. We were bundled into pickups and driven to the runway. I saw very many people, including women kneeling. The lady called [Tuweil] Kamilya (UAE) was sitting down crying. The men were blindfolded and had their hands handcuffed behind their backs. Their feet were chained. I was led to the group of women and ordered to kneel there too. An armed man came to me and pulled down my headscarf to cover my eyes as had been done [to] the other women. There were many children. Some were crying loudly. The men had black hoods covering their heads. We stayed kneeling there for quite some time, until our knees ached. We were then taken up to the plane, still blindfolded. I could however see through my headscarf as it was of a light material . . . It was very scaring, cold, and wet.⁵

Once she reached Ethiopia, Zaina was held in a prison cell with approximately twenty women and children, including a Swede, a Sudanese, and a Yemeni.⁶ Doctors soon discovered that Zaina was pregnant, and she was released in April. Pressure from human rights groups eventually compelled the Kenyan government to repatriate Abdul and other Kenyan nationals back home. Despite the fact that a military court in Ethiopia had cleared Abdul and his compatriots of any wrongdoing, the Kenyan government maintained an aura of suspicion around the returning men, declaring that they would remain under government surveillance. National newspapers reproduced the government’s rhetoric of suspicion, referring to the men as “Osama agents” whose return “stirs painful memories” of the 1998 Al-Qaeda attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.⁷

The story of Abdul and Zaina—like those of the other detainees—remains largely overlooked by those who have sought to document the costs of the so-called “war on terror.”⁸ Yet the events of early 2007 point to the rise of “entangled pacifications,” wherein seemingly marginal Global South states play increasingly critical roles in the shape-shifting topography of global policing, counter-insurgency, and war.⁹

In the wake of the toppling of the Islamic Courts Union and the rise of the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, the Kenyan state increasingly conducted militarized operations in partnership with foreign powers. Kenyan Muslims took note of this shift: 2007 was an election year, and the country’s Muslim minority population united around shared concerns about their safety in the face of invasive, often deadly police tactics. Surveillance, arbitrary arrests, and disappearances had become common practice despite the efforts of activists to forestall the enactment of new laws that would grant the police discretionary powers to fight “terror.” Of growing concern was the US–trained Anti-Terror Police Unit (ATPU), a special branch of the Kenyan police that has since become notorious for its plain-clothes death squads that operate with impunity.¹⁰ By 2012, accounts of the ATPU’s phantom-like power circulated in homes, schools, mosques, and community spaces, raising alarms about the spread of elusive policing practices that disappeared their relatives and neighbors. These terrifying practices persist today: on good days, missing relatives or neighbors eventually appear in court. On bad days, their bodies are found in unmarked graves outside of town.

War-Making as Worldmaking chronicles how life is lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets. In the past twenty years, the very notion of a “war zone” has become porous, as the US military has sought to avoid full-scale invasions (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan) in favor of discrete, targeted actions in places where the United States has not officially declared war (e.g. Somalia).¹¹ The US military often refers euphemistically to these more recent sites of engagement as “gray zones,” claiming that they do not easily map onto traditional conceptualizations of war or peace. In a striking parallel to colonial-era framings of Africa as the ‘dark continent,’ American military officials conceive of Africa in its entirety as a “gray zone” characterized by complex, volatile political environments in need of “stabilization.”¹²

This book challenges the tendency among policymakers to normalize such obfuscating language, and instead aims to shed light on the very real human impact of the so-called war on terror in East Africa. As we shall see, this region has become an experimental ground for temporally open-ended and spatially dispersed military operations, and for the redistribution of risk from US forces to US–trained African forces.¹³ This has had the effect of expanding both the geographies and technologies through which life is regulated and policed. While we have some knowledge of the destructive effects of drone strikes in Somalia, the growing role of specially trained “counter-terrorism” police forces in places like Kenya demands that we adopt a wider geographical lens when reflecting on the lived realities of the war on terror in the region. From surveillance, disappearances, and extra-judicial killings to the infiltration of social and family life, the reliance on counter-insurgency strategies means that the war on terror is as much a form of police action as it is military engagement.¹⁴ Against theorizations of war as an exceptional event that is distinguishable from “peace” time, I approach the war on terror as a multilayered, protracted assault on the dignity and safety of its targets. My focus is not on spectacular instances of violent destruction, but on how people learn to live through the structural, incremental, and less visible forms of violence that have their own devastating effects.¹⁵

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Kenya has long been a key ally of the United States in the war on terror. Considered a frontline state against terrorism, it hosts the largest US embassy in Africa and is among the top recipients of US security assistance on the continent.¹⁶ Between 2010 and 2020, the US Department of Defense provided $400 million in counter-terrorism “train and equip” support, enabling Kenya to vastly expand its security architecture.¹⁷ This has emboldened the Kenyan state to perform and enact its power in new ways. In October 2011, for example, the Kenyan military dispatched 2,000 troops across the border into Somalia in the name of quelling the threat posed by Al-Shabaab. The invasion came at a time when the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigations into crimes related to the 2007 postelection violence risked jeopardizing Kenya’s image abroad, and risked reigniting ethnic tensions within the country. War became a distraction from both issues—uniting the country against a common enemy, and shifting international attention away from its problems at home by declaring itself a leader on matters of peace and security abroad.

I situate my analysis of Kenya within a broader geopolitical landscape that has embraced military solutions to political problems. While the war on terror serves as a driving force for this shift, a wider lens enables us to account for the ways in which security orientations permeate the realm of transnational governance, from democracy promotion to humanitarianism and development assistance, displacing critique of militarism and military power.¹⁸ Indeed, the rise of what scholars refer to as “liberal,” “feel-good militarism” is made possible by invocations of law and legality, and by a rhetoric of nonwar (e.g., “peace enforcement,” “stabilization,” “human security”) that simultaneously authorizes more war even as it obscures war’s brutal realities.¹⁹

This new military “normal” enables African states to expand their policing, military, and surveillance capabilities and to crack down on dissent, all in the name of security.²⁰ In 2021, for example, (then) President Uhuru Kenyatta proudly boasted that Kenya’s police-to-population ratio had jumped by nearly 40 percent since he assumed office in 2013, reaching the highest level in Kenyan history.²¹ Meanwhile, covert paramilitary units armed and trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency have been granted the license to engage in offensive operations including renditions, disappearances, and alleged summary executions.²² But because Kenya is understood to be a “democracy” in the formal sense of the word, these developments prompt minimal scrutiny, particularly among its Euro-American donor-partners. It is the seeming normality and naturalization of the state of affairs in Kenya that guides my interest in the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. At a time when political analysts are attempting to understand the wave of military coups that have swept the continent in recent years, we have been presented with theories of democratic “backsliding,” wherein the democratic underpinnings of those countries that have experienced a coup are understood to be in crisis. With a primary focus on the idea of a crisis, the liberal-democratic project itself is overlooked and presumed to be an inherent good. While analysis of the coups is important, one effect of the sudden flurry of media coverage is a concomitant glossing over and naturalization of the purportedly good/stable/functioning democracies—like Kenya—against which the coup-ridden states are being measured and evaluated. The fixation with the seeming exception risks depoliticizing the norm—reducing “democracy” to civilian rule and the practice of holding regular elections.²³

This book invites us to reexamine the norm by grappling with the increasingly blurred boundaries between civilian and military power in a democratic state that is often upheld as a model for neighboring states. It is only by turning away from the seeming exception that the tensions inherent to the liberal-democratic project become clear: in 2010, Kenya adopted a new constitution that was widely celebrated for its commitment to human rights and political inclusion—seen as a positive step for the country’s historically marginalized Muslim minority population. At the same time, the government was becoming more deeply ensconced in a war against a purported enemy in the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” prompting discriminatory and abusive practices against Muslims in the name of security. These two seemingly conflicting dynamics are in fact closely related: it is precisely Kenya’s professed commitment to democracy that simultaneously works to legitimate and obscure its embrace of militarism and war.

Having ascertained that political leadership and recognition on the global stage are increasingly associated with a readiness to act in the name of “security,” the ruling elite in Kenya has harnessed the country’s participation in the war on terror to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about its place in the world. Specifically, I consider how performance, ritual, and public relations strategies work to distinguish Kenya as a leader on matters of peace and security, and to cultivate popular support domestically for militarized responses to “terror.” War-making and race-making are intricately entangled, as Kenya’s rise as a self-appointed leader is predicated on its seeming exceptionalism—on its standing apart from the “typical” African country plagued by violence and instability.²⁴ So too is it predicated on an articulation of difference in the form of the suspected terrorist.

While Kenya has emerged as a regional power with growing international visibility, left largely unexamined are the simmering low-intensity assaults on the dignity and safety of its Muslim minority population at home. As Kenyan Muslims increasingly link their own experiences of policing and criminalization to the subjugation of Muslims elsewhere in the world, some characterize the war on terror as a war on Islam and Muslims. Rather than pathologize these articulations as evidence of “extremism,” this book asks how they give meaning to histories of interrelation that transcend national and regional boundaries, constituting a worldmaking practice. My interest is therefore not in religious or cultural enmity, but in modes of political consciousness and solidarity that form contingently in relation to power.²⁵ By tracing how Kenyan Muslims learn to live through the blurred boundaries between war and peace, the political and the criminal, citizen and suspect, I tell a story not simply of abject oppression, but of solidarity and survival as differently situated people remake a world made and unmade by militarism and endless war.

Soon thereafter, the Clinton administration sought to strengthen its relationship with the Kenyan state as a security partner, negotiating access to Kenyan military facilities on the coast and to air bases across central Kenya. Already a regional hub for multinational corporations and the United Nations, Kenya’s position on the Indian Ocean afforded the US unhindered access to South Asia and the Middle East. In the wake of the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia in 1993, Kenya’s shared border with Somalia was of equal interest. The Kenyan government was quick to capitalize on this interest: in 2005 the Bush administration awarded Kenya the largest slice of security assistance from the East African Counter-Terrorism Initiative (EACTI). At $88 million, Kenya’s share represented nearly 90 percent of the total for the region.²⁷

Because of the power imbalances that characterize Kenya-US relations, Kenya is often dismissed as a proxy or mercenary force in what many conceive of as an American-led theater of operations. There is no question that the Kenyan state has been on the receiving end of considerable political and economic pressure to embrace the counter-terrorism agenda.²⁸ Yet the consequence of a US-centric frame is that Kenyans are rendered to the background, understood only as victims, perpetrators, or unthinking proxies for US interests. This book questions traditional conceptualizations of empire as a unidirectional imposition of power and instead weaves together multiple scales of analysis to demonstrate the ways in which seemingly marginal “peripheries” are bound up in, and constitutive of, our geopolitical present.²⁹ In asking how a different vantage point might generate new thinking about contemporary imperial formations, I aim to read empire otherwise, as “a story of multiple plots in small places.”³⁰

To this end, War-Making as Worldmaking engages calls to decolonize the study of world politics by pluralizing our subjects of inquiry.³¹ Even as I recognize the vast power discrepancies at play, political dynamics in the region are hardly reducible to the needs and interests of US empire. As Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere observed of dominant geopolitical analysis in the 1960s, “Every possible attempt is made to squeeze African events into the framework of the Cold War or other big power conflicts.” This implies, he says, “that Africa has no ideas of its own and no interests of its own.”³² Indeed we have a growing understanding of the ways that political leaders in Asia and Africa—in the postindependence period of the 1960s—were “asserting their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their own centers” across the Global South.³³ In his book Moving the Centre, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o foregrounds the ways that novelists and literary critics like himself sought to claim their own space and “to name the world for ourselves.”³⁴ In the political realm, as Adom Getachew documents, figures like Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Julius Nyerere were not just anticolonial nation builders, but worldmakers who strove to radically reconstitute the racialized, asymmetrical global order.³⁵

Yet scholars have also come to appreciate the need for a more sober accounting and assessment of worldmaking from the South. As Ella Shohat observes, “the ‘wretched of the earth’ are not unanimously revolutionary, nor necessarily allies to one another.”³⁶ The lingering tendency to romanticize subaltern populations in their encounters with imperial power comes with the risk of obscuring ambiguity, contradiction, and competing visions of the future. I am interested in grappling with Kenya’s contradictory positioning in relation to South–South solidarities: it is a place that once symbolized a threat to empire in the bold figure of the Mau Mau freedom fighter, but that—since obtaining independence—has been a counter-revolutionary force rather than a revolutionary one.³⁷ As Kenyan political elites are increasingly complicit in the normalization of militarism and endless war, we are witnessing the rise of a contradictory genre of Pan-Africanism that celebrates symbolic affirmations of Africa even as it reproduces racialized global power formations that differentially expose Africans to violence, exploitation, and premature death.³⁸ There is perhaps no better recent illustration of this than the Kenyan government’s announcement in August 2023 that it would lead a multinational armed intervention in Haiti, the world’s first independent Black nation born of organized slave rebellion. That Kenyan officials frame their decision to intervene in the language of Pan-Africanism serves as an important reminder that what were once utopian visions of unity and liberation are today entangled in imperial war-making and the reproduction of racial hierarchies.

With these contradictions in mind, this book emphasizes worldmaking’s simultaneous productive and destructive potential—at times charting emancipatory futures, while at times exclusionary and violent.³⁹ Embracing multiplicity and heterogeneity, I conceive of worldmaking as a situated practice that maps and remaps relations of power at different scales and localities.⁴⁰ This necessarily pluriversal framing includes but extends beyond the largely masculinist domain of the political elite to encompass variously positioned actors whose day-to-day practices, desires, and imaginings co-constitute ongoing processes of making and remaking the world.

In the past two decades, investigative journalists have worked tirelessly to collect and circulate information on the workings of the US military on the continent, focusing especially on AFRICOM.⁴³ Thanks to their efforts, we have learned about the network of military bases and detention sites that constitute the infrastructural backbone of counter-terror operations in Africa. From Mali and Niger to Kenya and Djibouti, we now have maps of logistics hubs, forward operating sites, cooperative security locations, and contingency locations—all of which help us conceptualize AFRICOM as a geopolitical assemblage whose everyday functioning across time and space facilitates imperial power.⁴⁴

Yet such maps privilege a god’s-eye view of a monolithic war machine seemingly detached from history, and from the lived realities of populations on the ground.⁴⁵ In many ways, the establishment of AFRICOM merely formalized a longstanding practice on the part of the US government of building infrastructures of terror in the form of specially trained militarized forces that were designed to protect US interests on the continent. During the Cold War, as Mahmood Mamdani documents, the United States supported armed groups around the world, “from RENAMO in Mozambique to UNITA in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afghanistan—through third and fourth parties.” Framed in the language of “low-intensity conflict,” this was, as Mamdani argues, terrorism by another name.⁴⁶

Today, the American left’s fascination with US technological and military power, coupled with “the seduction of revealing the hidden politics lurking in large systems,” leads many critics to believe that the most important story lies with US actors.⁴⁷ Yet the tendency among anti-imperial critics to focus only on the United States constitutes its own form of US exceptionalism.⁴⁸War-Making as Worldmaking asks what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations of imperial warfare, as more and more operations are conducted by so-called partner forces.⁴⁹ Across Africa today, the United States relies on African security forces in places where the United States is not officially at war, and where the very presence of US troops is likely to raise eyebrows. This demands that we reflect on what some scholars characterize as diffuse, distributed, or elastic empire—differentially distributed, opaque networks of technologies and actors that augment the reach of the war on terror to govern more bodies and spaces.⁵⁰ “Preferring to frame its interventions as temporary and limited,” explains Madiha Tahir, “the United States has been adept at distributing its capacities for violence among networks of collaborators.”⁵¹ It is precisely in this context that African security forces—once pathologized by Euro-American policymakers as symbols of violence and state failure—have been championed as the solutions to instability. In Somalia, it is not Americans, but Africans who do the bulk of the fighting. In addition to providing funding for a “peacekeeping” operation composed (at its height) of 22,000 troops from across East Africa, the United States has trained specialized police units in Somalia to engage in counter-terror operations against Al-Shabaab.⁵² The idea underpinning US strategy, to borrow the words of Adekeye Adebajo, is that “Africans do most of the dying, while the US does some of the spending to avoid being drawn into politically risky interventions.”⁵³

As it has with other countries across the Global South, the United States has adeptly exploited African states’ reliance on foreign credit to ensure their cooperation on security matters.⁵⁴ The fact that Kenya’s national debt has multiplied fivefold since 2013 means that its decision-making has inevitably been shaped by concerns about access to credit.⁵⁵ The growing investment in militarism across the continent must therefore be situated within an understanding of the continued significance of finance imperialism.⁵⁶ Despite the economic meltdown brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, African governments expanded their military spending in 2021 to almost $40 billion, with Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, and Uganda featured among the top ten spenders.⁵⁷ Yet there remains a tendency to privilege political economy as the primary frame of analysis, obscuring the fact that war-making is as much a cultural field of representation and meaning as it is a violent project.⁵⁸ Africans are not simply “cannon fodder” in an externally driven war, but in some cases seek meaningful participation in the war on terror as a universal endeavor.

In The Universal Enemy, Darryl Li offers a broad analytical framework that can help us reflect on the ways in which populations worldwide are culturally conscripted into the contemporary project of “good” vs. “evil.” “In this world order,” he writes, “there have been two primary ways of characterizing armed conflicts: localized ethnic wars and a globally threatening militant Islam. The former, marked by the ‘post-Cold War’ is presented as peripheral, regionally confined, and destabilizing in only a distant sense, producing hordes of hapless victims in need of mercy and management . . . The latter, framed as ‘post-9/11’ produces the figure of the terrorist as the one the world must band together to defeat.”⁵⁹ In short, the war on terror is a civilizational project undergirded by carefully constructed distinctions between those who purportedly belong to civilized humanity, and those who do not. ⁶⁰

With this backdrop in mind, Kenya’s growing assertiveness on matters of security is not merely a political-economic calculation, but equally a universalist claim and aspiration of belonging to the “civilized” world.⁶¹ As mentioned earlier, Kenya is one of only a few African nations to have attained relative prominence in Western media and scholarly circles, often constituting the standard against which observers measure the so-called successes and failures of other African states.⁶² The country’s seeming exceptionality was apparent in global reactions to the 2007 postelection violence: when former UN secretary general Kofi Annan traveled to Nairobi to mediate peace talks, he lamented the possibility that Kenya could become yet another “failed” state: “We can’t let this happen to Kenya! We’d seen a lot of destruction in the region—Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur—and Kenya had been the safe haven for refugees. And suddenly Kenya itself was going!”⁶³ So invested was the Kenyan ruling class in maintaining an image of the country as exceptional that at this political juncture they established Brand Kenya and hired US lobbying and public relations firms for damage control.⁶⁴

As the figure of the Muslim “terrorist” now threatens the carefully crafted image of the country as a beacon of stability, Kenyan politicians have sought to demonstrate leadership in the domain of security. By cultivating a popular common sense about security-as-responsibility, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto have positioned themselves as moral actors in the crusade against “evil,” reframing the war on terror as “our war”—one that Africans have a responsibility to fight. Kenya is not alone in this regard: Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni was the first African leader to visit the World Trade Center site after 9/11, offering $150,000 to the victims of the attacks.⁶⁵ Uganda was also the first to send troops for the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia (AMISOM).⁶⁶ More recently, Rwanda has gained international visibility for its “proactive” approach to security since it unilaterally deployed troops to Mozambique.⁶⁷ Yet the ongoing tendency to confine African states to the periphery of global affairs means that we have few analytical tools to grasp the increasingly central role these states play in shaping the norms and politics of post-9/11 militarized interventionism.⁶⁸ Theories of the postcolonial “predicament,” combined with methodological nationalism and lingering Eurocentrism, have led scholars to cede analysis to mainstream international relations (IR) theory.⁶⁹ My objective is neither to celebrate nor condemn, but to create an analytical opening: rather than confine the actions of the Kenyan state to the more limited domain of “African politics,” I wrestle with imperial entanglements.

War-Making as Worldmaking contends that only by writing Kenya into the story of post-9/11 imperial warfare can we trace the extension of militarized interventionism into ever-expanding domains. Historically, Kenya has been a key contributor to UN peacekeeping missions, but has been reluctant to dispatch troops to operations with an enforcement component. The decision to invade Somalia in 2011 therefore signaled an unprecedented shift toward a more aggressive foreign policy—one that was shaped as much by national and regional political considerations as by wider forces.⁷⁰ Prior to the invasion, for example, the Kenyan military had been the object of ridicule as an “untested,” largely ceremonial army. Several of my interlocutors made note of this, describing jokes exchanged among political leaders and military officials from neighboring states that indirectly questioned the masculinity of the Kenyan military on the grounds that it had yet to engage in “real” combat. Hardly unique to Africa, and inevitably inflected by colonial-era practices that questioned the masculinity of the colonized, Kenya’s nascent assertions of militarized masculinity are unfolding in a broader geopolitical context that equates political leadership with experience on the battlefield.⁷¹

As we shall see, the war on terror has become a site for geopolitical performances and contestations of manhood as Kenyan leaders work to project an image of strength and virility at home and abroad. Alongside a dramatic surge in military spending (in 2016, Kenya’s military budget of $993 million stood at more than double the spending of neighboring Uganda and Ethiopia combined),⁷² the Kenyan state has displayed a missionary zeal as it presents itself as a moral force ordained with special responsibilities on questions related to security.⁷³ As Kenyan officials reframe the war on terror as one that Kenyans have a duty to fight, we become attuned to the emergence of paternalistic assertions of authority and superiority over purportedly uncivilized others both near and far. This compels us to consider the significance of rhetoric, symbols, and meaning—and more specifically, the centrality of gender alongside race in shaping the symbolic bases of power on the global stage. Rather than maintaining a more limited focus on political economy, this book pushes us to expand our conceptualization of the geopolitical to encompass the realms of imagination, emotion, and popular culture.⁷⁴ Indeed, affect and emotion (be it fear of the enemy, or desire for security) are constitutive of—rather than epiphenomenal to—our increasingly militarized world.⁷⁵ The performative dimensions of geopolitics are not simply a façade, but are themselves part of the making and unmaking of the world through war.

“Africa” as idea and geopolitical space has long been racialized as the quintessential other in the global order of nation-states.⁷⁷ The concept of the “failed” or “fragile” state, on the one hand, and the need for “good governance,” on the other, constitute two strands of a conceptual vocabulary that international policymakers regularly employ in relation to Africa, often to warn about conflict, instability, and the threat of terrorism.⁷⁸ While on the surface such terms may appear to be free of racial tropes, scholars have demonstrated the ways in which they are both informed by and produce racialized ideas about place and space.⁷⁹ As Siba Grovogui documents, the history of colonialism requires that we scrutinize the racialization of international knowledge, wherein the so-called international community is generally portrayed as white, male, Christian, and guided by morality and neutrality.⁸⁰ Indeed, the discursive production or “cultural coding” of certain peoples and places is deeply informed by racialized notions of governance, rationality, and civilization.⁸¹

We have a rich understanding of the significance of race and racism in legitimating imperial exploitation and intervention. But we must look beyond the mere functionality of race to empire.⁸² Approaching race as a dynamic and contingent field of power, we become attuned to the ways in which political and cultural identities emerge in dialogue with the legacies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and the enduring myth of white supremacy. Given that colonial rule was as much a cultural project as a system of economic exploitation and dispossession, postcolonial African societies continue to be haunted by racialized notions of hierarchy that view whiteness “as the standard for all that is good, true, and valuable.”⁸³ In Kenya, writes Christine Mungai, “whiteness remains an organizing philosophy, an epistemological tool, and a way of being in the world, normalized so thoroughly as not to need white bodies to enact it.” To grapple with this reality, as Jemima Pierre observes, is “not to deny or diminish the significance of other processes of identification such as ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, and class.”⁸⁴ Rather, it is to recognize “how even in independent Africa, race is the modality through which many of these identifications continue to be structured.”⁸⁵

The war on terror offers fertile terrain to explore continuities and transformations in processes of racial formation, attending to the cross-cutting and multiscalar dimensions of race and racialization in Africa today. While racialized constructions of threat represent one side of the war on terror, less explored are the ways in which race is refashioned and reproduced through warfare. With the rise of the post–Cold War security framework of “African solutions to African problems,” racialized evaluations of African capacity to govern have been extended to the domains of war and policing. Militarism in the name of “global peace and security” has thus become a vehicle to symbolically overcome the degradations of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy. In many ways, the Kenyan state’s growing visibility as a leader in the war on terror is suggestive of a new, more equal global order in which African states can overcome their racial and categorical subordination on the world stage.

Here, the mobilization of the idea of equality is imbricated in the reinforcement of lingering racialized distinctions and structural inequalities—a hallmark of racial liberalism. ⁸⁶ Indeed, Kenya’s rise as an exceptional Black nation is predicated on rewriting racism as a question of bias and prejudice rather than as a systemic problem rooted in political economy. It is also predicated on distancing itself from fellow Africans, including the figure of the purportedly foreign Muslim terrorist. This offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the historically specific ways in which race is imbricated with religion, as information economies about “unstable” Africa intersect with those focused on “violent” Islam.⁸⁷ There is growing scholarly interest in tracing the legacies of colonial-era mappings of alterity about Blackness and Islam, and about Africa and the Arab world—racial, religious, and geographic categories that are often simplistically portrayed as distinct from one another.⁸⁸ These artificial divides are reinforced in university settings by area studies frameworks that fail to account for geographies of interrelation. Despite the close conceptual association between Islam and the Arab world, there are in fact far more Muslims in Africa: the continent’s population is, by conservative estimates, well over 40 percent Muslim.⁸⁹ Yet the tendency in both policy and scholarly circles to speak of “Islam in Africa” has the effect of positioning Islam as an alien, external force on the continent, and of reifying colonial geographic imaginaries that are fundamentally out of step with reality.⁹⁰

This book thus attends to the ways in which race and religion emerge as geographic conceptualizations of difference, signifying not only “status in a hierarchy from superior to inferior but also a spatial positioning as in- or out-of-place.”⁹¹ Informed by scholars of transregionalism and Indian Ocean studies, I employ a relational approach in order to foreground cross-border connections and circulations, as well as to consider the co-constitution of ideas about difference across multiple, overlapping geographies and histories.⁹² Indeed, careful consideration of Kenyan history reveals the need for critical analysis of Africa’s racial others beyond the Black/white binary. During the colonial era, British officials employed a racial system that constituted Asians and Arabs as “immigrant” races. These populations (and, for a brief period, Isaaq and Harti Somalis) were generally classified as nonnative citizens alongside Europeans, thereby blurring the boundaries between the colonizer and a minority among the colonized.⁹³ These “subject races,” as Mamdani refers to them, do not fit neatly into conventional histories.⁹⁴ While on the one hand they enjoyed legal protections not afforded to their “native” counterparts, they also point to the presence of an internal “other.”

The war on terror has repoliticized notions of foreignness and belonging, leading Kenyans to question those “who racially might be seen as the same,” but who are “associated with some ‘morally suspect’ past (colonial), space (borders), or activity (political party or social movement).”⁹⁵ These incongruous, conflicting conceptions of Africanness and Blackness are in tension with the monolithic constructions that dominate discussions of Africa in the US academy, reminding us of the instability of Blackness/Africanness as categories of social organization.⁹⁶ Inattentiveness to this complexity has the effect of overdetermining homogeneity, obscuring the myriad historical, political, and cultural influences within the continent, and between Africa and the wider world.⁹⁷ In Kenya, Muslims of different racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., the Giriama, the Swahili, the Somali) have long negotiated racism, ethnocentrism and questions of hierarchy, status, and power.⁹⁸ Yet racial identities and meanings have always been fluid in practice, shifting according to context. Today, Kenyan politicians and national media outlets actively shape public fears by fostering a Christian majority sensibility that associates the country’s Muslim minority population as a whole with suspicion and violence.⁹⁹ What it means to be Muslim in Kenya today is therefore increasingly shaped by a shared subjection to surveillance and criminalization that links otherwise divergent experiences of racialization. Indeed, as government officials warn of a network of suspicious actors emanating from a seemingly unified Muslim “community,” racialized distinctions within Kenya’s Muslim minority population collapse to produce the global figure of the threatening Muslim.¹⁰⁰ The racialized figure of the person who “looks Muslim” has appeared on “wanted” posters across Kenya, from billboards to national newspapers. While security experts speak in abstract terms about the need to stabilize “volatile” environments, this book aims to shed light on the visceral, embodied dimensions of the war on terror. As suspicion and surveillance increasingly structure daily life for Kenyan Muslims, social interactions and routine movements are shaped by the perception—and sensation—of being watched, or what Ronak Kapadia refers to as the “sensorial life of empire.”¹⁰¹

Notes

1. With the exception of names of public figures, I use pseudonyms for most individuals throughout the book.

2. See Justice Forum, “East African Renditions.”

3. “Rendition” refers to the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another with the purpose of circumventing the former country’s laws on interrogation, detention, and torture.

4. One of the detainees reported that they were interrogated by officials from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Pakistan, and Libya. See Muslim Human Rights Forum, Horn of Terror, 11.

5. Muslim Human Rights Forum, Horn of Terror, 11.

6. In contrast to Afghanistan and Iraq, where Muslim women were constructed as victims in need of saving, women in East Africa have been subjected to rendition and inhumane prison conditions. In the context of the transnational border operation of 2007, for example, at least nineteen women were apprehended and held for weeks—if not months—without being charged. Several of these women were pregnant, and some were accompanied by children. As Malinda Smith explains, some of them were held because their husbands or brothers were persons of interest, while others “were reportedly tortured in the belief that because of family ties, they had information on the Islamic Courts Union.” See Smith, “Africa, 9/11 and the Temporality and Spatiality of Race and Terror”; Muslim Human Rights Forum, Horn of Terror. On the politics of “saving” Muslim women, see Abu Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

7. Agina, “Osama Agents Back in Kenya,” The Standard, 2008.

8. For exceptions, see Muslim Human Rights Forum, Horn of Terror; Human Rights Watch, “Why Am I Still Here?”; Qureshi, “War on Terror”; and Usiskin, America’s Covert War in East Africa. Alex Lubin characterizes the US-led war on terror as “both a material war with serious geopolitical outcomes, especially for its targets, as well as a discursive battle about the meaning of US empire.” See Lubin, Never-Ending War on Terror, 8. I would add that the question of violence—how it is represented, legitimated, and deployed—is central to the war on terror.

9. See Muller, “Entangled Pacifications.”

10. Kenyan counter-terror forces have also been trained by Israel and the United Kingdom. See Gidron, Israel in Africa; Shabibi, “Revealed: The CIA and MI6’s Secret War in Kenya.” Shabibi explains that many operations believed to have been conducted by the Anti-Terror Police Unit (ATPU) were later revealed to have been led by the CIA-backed Rapid Response Team, a clandestine “special team” of the Kenyan paramilitary General Service Unit’s Recce Company.

11. See Bhungalia, Elastic Empire; Hoffman, The War Machines; Singh, Race and America’s Long War; Turse, The Changing Face of Empire; Parks and Kaplan, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare; Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths; Moyn, Humane.

12. See Hoffman, “Geometry after the Circle”; Segell, “Including Africa Threat Analysis in Force Design 2023.”

13. Bachmann, “Policing Africa,” 120. See also Gould and Demmers, “An Assemblage Approach to Liquid Warfare”; Hoffman, “Geometry after the Circle.” As Bachmann explains, the US military has “taken counterinsurgency thinking and practice to non-war spaces,” making Africa an experimental site where new ideas about stabilization can be tested. Bachmann notes that the key pillars of the US military’s stability operations doctrine intersect with concerns of police science. Specifically,“the simultaneous deployment of civil affairs teams and special operations forces gradually leads to a normalization of preventative military activity aimed at fostering a notion of ‘good order’ in so-called fragile contexts. It is in this sense that we understand the activities subsumed under the label ‘stabilization’ as a form of policing.” Bachmann, “Policing Africa,” 120.

14. As scholars remind us, a singular fixation with military omnipotence has the effect of upholding the liberal myth of the war/police distinction. See especially Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power; Bachmann, Bell, and Holmqvist, War, Police, and Assemblages of Intervention; Tahir, “Violence Work and the Police Order.” On the significance of policing in counterinsurgency, see Khalili, Time in the Shadows; Bachman, “Policing Africa”; Yonucu, Police, Provocation, Politics; Singh, Race and America’s Long War; Schrader, Badges without Borders.

15. I am in dialogue with scholars who attend to the routinized structural violence that constitutes the social condition of war. In the words of Robin Kelley, the consequences for those targeted “ought not to be measured merely by the destructive force of American-made F-15s, cluster bombs, and white phosphorus, but also by the everyday routine” of policing and organized abandonment. See Kelley, “Thug Nation”; see also Khayyat, A Landscape of War; Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos; Hermez, War Is Coming; Burton, Tip of the Spear.

16. A 2016 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that the United States provided more than $8 million in antiterrorism law enforcement support to Kenya annually, the largest such allocation to any sub-Saharan African country. Financial support to the Kenya Defence Forces for counter-terrorism-related training and equipment increased more than threefold since 2013, and was projected to reach over $120 million in 2016. See Blanchard, “Kenya: In Focus.”

17. Blanchard, “Kenya: In Focus.”

18. Abrahamsen, “Return of the Generals.”

19. As Laleh Khalili observes, “the very ‘humanization’ of asymmetric warfare and the application of liberal precepts to its conduct have legitimated war making as political intervention.” Khalili, Time in the Shadows, 3. Writing about the obfuscating language of prisons (e.g., “correctional institutions”), Orisanmi Burton argues that “these nomenclatural reforms and euphemistic baptisms were part of a broader strategy of psychological warfare through which counterinsurgency intellectuals aimed to present a benign public image without in any way altering their repressive and dehumanizing function within the social order.” Burton, Tip of the Spear, 17–18. See also Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War; Basham, War, Identity, and the Liberal State; Bachmann, Bell and Holmqvist, War, Police, and Assemblages of Intervention; Tudor, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats; Amar, The Security Archipelago; Greenburg, At War with Women; Moyn, Humane; Abrahamsen, “Return of the Generals”; Gelot and Sandor, “African Security and Global Militarism”; Orford, “Muscular Humanitarianism.”

20. On the idea of military normal, see Lutz, “The Military Normal.” On how African states have capitalized on the military normal, see Branch, Displacing Human Rights; Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War; Epstein, Another Fine Mess; Bachmann, “Governmentality and Counterterrorism.”

21. See “National Police Service Annual Report, 2021.”

22. See especially Namir Shabibi, “Revealed: The CIA and MI6’s Secret War in Kenya.”

23. For more, see especially Niang, “Coups, Insurgency, and Imperialism in Africa”; Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa; Mkandawire, “Disempowering New Democracies and the Persistence of Poverty.”

24. For more on the intersection of war-making and race-making, see Singh, Race and America’s Long War; Man, Soldiering through Empire; Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon; Goldberg, “Militarizing Race”; Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics; Edwards, The Other Side of Terror; Rana, Terrifying Muslims; Li, The Universal Enemy; Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason.

25. See especially Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. Mamdani interrogates the assumption among Western analysts that the political subjectivities of Muslims are shaped primarily by their religion or culture. He traces the modern roots of what he calls “culture talk” to the days of European colonialism, where theories of cultural difference between the colonizers and the colonized functioned to legitimize colonial rule. Culture talk ascribed modernity, rationality, and humanism to the Occident while ascribing a cultural “lack” in these traits among inhabitants of the Orient, and the Muslim world in particular. Mamdani insists that we turn this cultural theory of politics on its head, arguing that culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. See also Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon; Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country; Li, The Universal Enemy.

26. See Hirsch, In the Moment of Greatest Calamity.

27. See Omeje, “The War on Terror and the Crisis of Postcoloniality in Africa”; Prestholdt, “Kenya, the United States, and Counterterrorism.”

28. As Wanjiru Kamau observes, the US and UK governments both imposed restrictions on their citizens’ ability to travel to Kenya in response to delays in the implementation of Kenya’s “Suppression of Terrorism Bill,” which closely resembled the US Patriot Act. Kenyan political leaders characterized this strategy as tantamount to economic sanctions, given that the country relied so heavily on tourism as a source of hard currency. Kamau, “Kenya and the War on Terrorism.”

29. I draw on the work of many others who similarly argue about the centrality of seemingly marginal places and populations to global and imperial processes. See Trouillot, Global Transformations; Ong, Flexible Citizenship; Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism”; Stoler, Imperial Debris; Ferguson, Global Shadows; Kramer, Blood of Government; Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World”; Metcalf, Imperial Connections; Moyd, Violent Intermediaries; Schields, Offshore Attachments; Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies; Amar, The Security Archipelago; Hönke and Müller, eds., The Global Making of Policing; Hart, “Denaturalizing Dispossession”; Razavi, “Navigating the ‘Middle East’ in Washington”; Tahir, “The Distributed Empire of the War on Terror”; Rhys Machold, “India’s Counterinsurgent Knowledge.”

30. Nesiah, “An Un-American Story of the American Empire.” As Nesiah writes there, “Not just unidirectional from center to periphery, American empire is also constituted and destabilized through the complex, ambiguous, and ever shifting dialectic of historical circumstances and political projects through which the subjects of empire engage the world, and in that process, shape it” (1453). See also Lutz, “Empire Is in the Details”; Li, “From Exception to Empire.” We must also be attentive to the shifting geopolitical landscape and the potential waning of US hegemony. While the United States continues to wield outsized military power on the continent, it is facing stiff competition in East Africa and the Horn, where China, Turkey, India, and the Gulf States have a growing presence.

31. See especially Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism & Anarchy; Khayyat, A Landscape of War; Prestholdt, Domesticating the World; Gopal, Insurgent Empire; Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire; Sabaratnam, “IR in Dialogue”; Sharp, “Subaltern Geopolitics”; Amar, The Security Archipelago; Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics; Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics; Thornton, Revolution in Development; Heredia and Wai, Recentering Africa in International Relations.

32. Nyerere, Stability and Change in Africa, 2.

33. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, 4.

34. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, 4.

35. Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire; see also Lee, Making a World After Empire; Prashad, The Darker Nations.

36. Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” 100. See also Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong)”; Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment; Hundle, Insecurities of Expulsion.

37. Long before US officials worried about the figure of the Muslim “terrorist” in East Africa, they were preoccupied with the possibility that the spirit of the anticolonial struggle in Kenya would spread to Black America. As Gerald Horne explains, “So concerned were the U.S. authorities . . . that when in 1968 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) expanded their notorious COINTELPRO—or counter-intelligence program—one of their chief goals was to ‘prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups’ that ‘might be the first step toward a real ‘Mau Mau’ in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.” Horne, Mau Mau in Harlem, 13. See also Osborne, “Mau Mau Are Angels”; Alvarado, “Mau Mau as Method.”

38. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Gilmore, Golden Gulag.

39. Getachew also accounts for the destructive potential of worldmaking, characterizing European imperialism “as itself a world-constituting force that violently inaugurated an unprecedented era of globality.” Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 3. Fadi Bardawil astutely notes that while the intellectual and theoretical project of decentering the West “is staged as a liberatory act of decolonization, its decentering in practice does not necessarily usher in an era of progressive politics.” Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment, xv–xvi.

40. See especially Ong, “Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global”; Escobar, Pluriversal Politics; Rofel and Rojas, New World Orderings. Rofel and Rojas emphasize the significance of history, culture, and imaginative processes.

41. For more on the vast assemblage of US military bases, see Lutz and Enloe, The Bases of Empire; Vine, Base Nation.

42. See Turse, “The U.S. Military Says It Has a ‘Light Footprint’ in Africa.” As defined by the US military, a cooperative security location (CSL) is “a host-nation facility with little or no permanent U.S. personnel presence, which may contain prepositioned equipment and/or logistical arrangements and serve both for security cooperation activities and contingency access.”

43. See especially Scahill, Dirty Wars; Turse Tomorrow’s Battlefield.

44. On AFRICOM as geopolitical assemblage, see Moore and Walker, “Tracing the US Military’s Presence in Africa.”

45. As feminist geographers have long reminded us, cartography was an integral component of the masculine imperial imagination during the colonial era, largely because of its distancing and objectifying effects. Caren Kaplan observes that “the challenge for those of us who study the history of visuality in relation to military technologies is to avoid remythologizing and promoting the narratives generated by colonial occupations and asymmetric warfare.” Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths, 210. And as Ronak Kapadia implores, we need “alternative systems of knowing, feeling, and living with and beyond forever warfare.” Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 12. For further discussion, see Dowler and Sharp, “A Feminist Geopolitics?”; Rofel, “Modernity’s Masculine Fantasies”; Grewal, Transnational America; Hyndman, “Mind the Gap”; Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism”; Sparke, In the Space of Theory.

46. See Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; McFadden, “Interrogating Americana”; Mama, “Beyond Survival”; Minter, Apartheid’s Contras.

47. Hecht, “Introduction,” in Entangled Geographies, 2. On the fascination with drones specifically, see Parks and Kaplan, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare; Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths.

48. Paul Kramer characterizes this singular focus on US actors and institutions as a form of nationalist transnationalism that is limited by a tendency to pose US-oriented questions. Kramer, “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire.” As Zoe Samudzi observes, “adoration and disgust are two sides of the same Americentric coin.” Samudzi, “Journey from the Center of the World.”

49. See especially Coburn, Under Contract; Li, “Offshoring the Army”; Hoffman, “Geometry after the Circle”; Moore, Empire’s Labor; Tahir, “The Distributed Empire of the War on Terror.”

50. Li, “From Exception to Empire”; Tahir, “The Distributed Empire of the War on Terror”; Bhungalia, Elastic Empire; Gregory, “Dirty Dancing.”

51. Tahir, “The Distributed Empire of the War on Terror.”

52. See especially Ṣóyẹmí, “Making Crisis Inevitable.”

53. Adebajo, “Africa, African-Americans, and Avuncular Sam.”

54. Ahmed, “Towards a Law and Political Economy Approach to the War on Terror.”

55. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $2.34 billion loan to Kenya in 2021, triggering protests about what this would mean for the country’s economic sovereignty. See Warah, “Why Kenyans Fear Another IMF Loan,” May 2021. See also “Kenya Vote Backdrop Is Anger over Living Costs, Debt,” Washington Post, 8 August 2022.

56. The Kenyan Ministry of Defense states on its website that “UN peace operations offer Kenyan soldiers and police a rare opportunity to obtain UN allowances that are ordinarily not offered by the KDF (Kenya Defence Forces) . . . Due to the huge sums involved, remittances—including from peacekeepers—are now being recognized as an important contributor to the country’s growth and development.” See “Kenya’s Peacekeeping Missions.”

57. SIPRI, “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2021,” April 2022.

58. For more on the significance of ideology, culture, and the imagination, see Gregory, The Colonial Present; Lubin, Never-Ending War on Terror; Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics.

59. Li, The Universal Enemy, 5

60. See also Neocleous, “The Police of Civilization.”

61. As Ferguson observes, “Yearnings for cultural convergence with an imagined global standard . . . can mark not simply mental colonization or capitulation to cultural imperialism, but an aspiration to overcome categorical subordination.” Ferguson, Global Shadows, 20.

62. Haugerud, The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya.

63. Quoted in Branch, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 19.

64. See especially Njoya, “Invisible Citizens”; see also Kessler and Kabukuru, “Shadow Diplomacy: African Nations Bypass Embassies, Tap Lobbyists.”

65. Fisher, “Some More Reliable Than Others.”

66. Epstein, Another Fine Mess. While Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia are all troop-contributing countries to AMISOM, all three militaries have simultaneously engaged in unilateral military operations in Somalia.

67. See Donelli, “Rwanda’s Military Diplomacy.”

68. Noting the interventions of non-Western powers like Iran and Turkey in Syria, Fadi Bardawil observes that such interventions “can be condemned morally and politically, but critical theories don’t have the resources to apprehend them conceptually.” Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment, xvii.

69. See, for example, Visweswaran, “Occupier/Occupied”; Heredia and Wai, Recentering Africa in International Relations. And as Siba Grovogui observes, “Our inability to understand that Africa actually sees itself as a part of the world, as a manager of the world, has so escaped us today that in the case of Libya for instance, when people were debating, you saw in every single newspaper in the world, including my beloved Guardian, that the African Union decided this, but the International Community decided that, as if Africans had surrendered their position in the international society to somebody: to the International Community. People actually said that! The AU, for all its ‘wretchedness’, after all represents about a quarter of the member states of the UN. And yet it was said the AU decided this and the International Community decided that. The implication is that the International Community is still the West plus Japan and maybe somebody else, and in this case it was Qatar and Saudi Arabia: ‘good citizens of the world,’ very ‘good democracies’ etc. That’s how deeply-set that is, that people don’t even check themselves. Every time they talk they chuck Africa out of the World. Nobody says, America did this and the International Community decided that. All I am saying is that our mindscapes are so deeply structured that nothing about Africa can be studied on its own, can be studied as something that has universal consequence.” Creutzfeldt, “Siba Grovogui on IR Theory as Theology.”

70. Most scholars contend that Kenya’s decision to invade was made independently of US influence or pressure. Some have pointed to the fact that Kenyan officials sought US support well in advance of the incursion but were “curtly rebuffed.” See Anderson and McKnight, “Kenya at War.” Beyond the official rhetoric of protecting its territorial integrity and national security, Kenya was keen to secure the area near the border with Somalia to ensure that it remained safe for investment and economic development, including oil exploration. The invasion also came at a time when the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigations into crimes related to the 2007 postelection violence risked jeopardizing Kenya’s image abroad, and came with the dangerous potential for renewed ethnic tensions within the country. War against a foreign enemy became a convenient distraction from both issues. For more, see Wanyeki, “Foreign Policy and Regional Relations”; Anderson and McKnight, “Kenya at War”; Rosen, “Strategic Posture Review”; Olsen, “The October 2011 Kenyan Invasion of Somalia”; Gathara, “The Guns of October.”

71. For more on this topic see Enloe, “Masculinity as Foreign Policy Issue”; Lewis, Empire State-building; McFadden, “Plunder as Statecraft”; Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow.

72. Otuki, “Nairobi leads EA Arms Race with Sh96 Billion Military Budget,” Business Daily Africa.

73. Kenyan military spending has since surpassed the $1 billion per year mark, hovering around $1.1 billion since 2017. It is worth noting that the size of the Kenyan military is considerably smaller than those of neighboring Ethiopia and Uganda.

74. In contrast to mainstream conceptualizations of geopolitics that continue to privilege Eurocentric ideas about disembodied actors operating only in official “public” and “global” realms, I am in dialogue with feminist scholars who foreground the significance of affect and emotion, and who insist that we scrutinize what kinds of sites are relevant for our understandings of war, empire, and geopolitics. A feminist analytic of scale interrogates the very constitution of the macro-picture while attending to the intimate, the embodied, and the everyday. See especially Massaro and Williams, “Feminist Geopolitics”; Smith, Intimate Geopolitics; Clarke, Affective Justice; Schields, Offshore Attachments; Flores-Villalobos, The Silver Women; Zeleke, Ethiopia in Theory; Baik, Reencounters; Ghosh, “Parade-Charade.”

75. See especially Aretxaga, “Maddening States”; Green, “Fear as a Way of Life”; Masco, The Theater of Operations; Ali, Delusional States; Rashid, Dying to Serve; Zia, Resisting Disappearance; Ghosh, A Thousand Tiny Cuts.

76. I concur with other scholars that we must address and think critically about the question of political violence, particularly with a view toward interrogating the paradigm of national security that authorizes more violence in response to perceived threats. See especially Asad, “Thinking about Terrorism and Just War”; Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Li, The Universal Enemy. In dialogue with abolition feminists, I concur that the time has come to re-imagine new modes of relationality and collective safety. See Kaba, We Do this ’Til We Free Us; Davis et al, Abolition. Feminism. Now.

77. See especially Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa; Grovogui, “Come to Africa”; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness.

78. Jones, “‘Good Governance’ and ‘State Failure,’” 62–63.

79. See especially Grovogui, “Come to Africa”; Shilliam, “What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us about Development, Security, and the Politics of Race”; Jones, “‘Good Governance’ and ‘State Failure’”; Wai, “Neopatrimonialism and the Discourse of State Failure in Africa”; Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness.

80. Grovogui, “Come to Africa.”

81. On the notion of “cultural coding,” see Springer, “Violence Sits in Places?”

82. Kramer argues for “the necessity of examining metropole and colony in a single, densely interactive field” in order to grasp the inseparability of “the racial remaking of empire and the imperial remaking of race.” Kramer, The Blood of Government, 2–3. See also Clarke and Thomas, eds., Globalization and Race.

83. Mungai, “The Whiteness Conference.” Avery Gordon uses the language of haunting as “one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known, and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with.” Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. See also Stoler, Haunted by Empire.

84. Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness, 5.

85. Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness, 5. As she elaborates, “The overall scholarly interest in ‘ethnic conflict’ or indigenous cultural traditions belies the continent’s relation to global racialized hierarchies against and through which these local events develop.”

86. For more on racial liberalism and its relationship to US empire see Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Singh, Race and America’s Long War.

87. For more on the intersectionality of race and religion, see Guner, “Transnational Muslim Crossings and Race in Africa”; Young and Weitzberg, “Globalizing Racism and De-Provincializing Muslim Africa”; Tounsel, Chosen Peoples.

88. Mazrui “Afrabia: Africa and the Arabs in the New World Order”; Gubara, “Revisiting Race and Slavery”; Aidi et al., “And the Twain Shall Meet”; Li, “Captive Passages”; Fadlalla, Branding Humanity; Ware, The Walking Qur’an.

89. More than one-sixth of the world’s Muslims live south of the Sahara (compared to one-tenth in North Africa). See Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 17.

90. For more, see Ware The Walking Qur’an; Marsh, “Compositions of Sainthood.”

91. Gross-Wyrtzen, “There Is No Race Here”; see also Malkki, “National Geographic”; Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil”; Chome, “Uses of Race.”

92. See especially Hofmeyr, “The Complicating Sea”; Srinivas et al., Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds; Bertz, Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean; Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class and the Legacy of Slavery; Hundle, Insecurities of Expulsion; Mahajan, “Notes on an Archipelagic Ethnography”; Young and Weitzberg, “Globalizing Racism and De-Provincializing Muslim Africa”; Aidi et al., “And the Twain Shall Meet”; Goldberg, “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms.” In his study of racial thought in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Zanzibar, Jonathan Glassman (War of Words) challenges the notion that European colonialism was the only source of ideas about difference, pointing to the significance of Zanzibari discourses about race, ethnicity, and notions of Arab supremacy. Precolonial Swahili words like Ustaarabu (civilization) and Mstaarabu (civilized person) for example, contained within them the figure of the Arab as civilized, and as source of civilization. Glassman, War of Words.

93. Mamdani,” Beyond Settler and Native.” As Weitzberg explains, Isaaq and Harti Somalis were initially classified as nonnative under the Somalia Exemption Ordinance (1919) but later lost many nonnative privileges. Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders. See also Turton, “Somali Resistance to Colonial Rule.”

94. Africans were ethnicized as “natives” and subject to customary law, whereas Europeans, Asians, and Arabs were racialized as “nonnatives” and governed by civil law. These processes of differentiation legitimated the introduction of separate laws that governed the lives of “natives” and “nonnatives.” Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

95. Ng’weno and Aloo, “Irony of Citizenship,” 145.

96. I join other scholars in foregrounding the politics of location for theorizations of race, even as we attend to continuities in processes of race and racialization across time and place. Paul Zeleza, for example, insists that scholars confront the epistemic hegemony of the Euro-American world system in shaping monolithic notions of Blackness, even among scholars and activists committed to Pan-Africanism. Zeleza, “Rewriting the African Diaspora.” Annie Olaloku-Teriba similarly notes what she refers to as “the subsumption of ‘Africanness’ by an Americanised conception of blackness,” observing that US theorizations of Blackness have become “unmoored from time and space.” Olaloku-Teriba, “Afro-Pessimism.” Emmanuel Akyeampong scrutinizes African American invocations of Africa as the homeland of Black people, noting that the continent continues to be imagined as “the place of Blacks where race, geography, and polity overlap(ped) naturally.” Akyeampong, “Race, Identity, and Citizenship in Black Africa,” 299. And as Keguro Macharia observes, “The history of blackness as a shared category is marked by disagreement, disavowal, and ambivalence, from those who distinguish themselves as ‘African, not black,’ to those who police blackness as a product of Atlantic slavery and thus unavailable to other populations.” Macharia, Frottage, 6. See also Li, “Captive Passages”; Tageldin, “The Place of Africa, in Theory.”

97. Clarke, “Mapping Transnationality.”

98. See especially Kindy, Life and Politics in Mombasa; Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda; Kresse, Philosophising in Mombasa; McIntosh, The Edge of Islam.

99. Muslims constitute 20–30 percent of Kenya’s predominantly Christian population, although conflicting reports exist on the exact figure. See Ndzovu, Muslims in Kenyan Politics.

100. On the post-9/11 racialization of Islam and Muslims, see Rana, Terrifying Muslims; Maira, The 9/11 Generation; Fernando, The Republic Unsettled; Kundnani, “Islamophobia as Ideology of U.S. Empire”; Li, “Captive Passages.”

101. See Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics.