Samar Al-Bulushi

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Insights from the Social Sciences

Samar Al-Bulushi

Samar Al-Bulushi is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and assistant professor (on leave 2018–2019) in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She obtained her PhD in anthropology at Yale University. Her research interests are broadly concerned with militarism, policing, geopolitics, race, elites, and transnational governance in the East and Horn of Africa. Al-Bulushi was a 2013 Dissertation Proposal Development (DPD) fellow as well as a 2014 International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) fellow. Her work has appeared in Transforming Anthropology, Africa is a Country, Jacobin, Intercepted, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, and Pambazuka News.

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From Our Fellows

Twenty Years On: The War on Terror in East Africa

by Samar Al-Bulushi

Samar Al-Bulushi marks the twentieth anniversary of the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a reflection on their legacy for the securitization of much of the African continent. Based on extensive field research in Kenya (supported by SSRC’s Dissertation Proposal Development and International Dissertation Research Fellowships), she analyzes the extension of American and European military presences in the region, the Kenyan military’s role in Somalia, and the ways in which police forces target Muslim citizens under the banner of antiterrorism. Even aid agencies and civil society organizations, Al-Bulushi argues, contribute to the discourse and practice of “countering violent extremism” with serious consequences.

August 7, 2018