Citizen-Suspect: Militarism, Race, and Geopolitics in the East African Warscape

Samar Al-Bulushi
Anthropology
UC Irvine

The Kenyan military’s invasion of Somalia in 2011 marked a pivotal turning point in the broader war against the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, triggering a wave of Al-Shabaab attacks inside Kenya. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya itself, the Kenyan state has worked closely with its Euro-American allies, subjecting its Muslim population to transnational assemblages of surveillance and policing—in many cases leading to their death or disappearance. Citizen-Suspect argues that Kenya has emerged as a key player in the post 9/11 era of endless war. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research with politicians, diplomats, human rights activists and young people in Nairobi and Mombasa, it explores the relationship between the imaginative and grounded geographies of the so-called ‘war on terror’ in East Africa today. Conceiving the war on terror as an assemblage of interconnected and mutually reinforcing geopolitical projects, the book grapples with the reality that targeted operations are unfolding not only in spaces of ‘war’ like neighboring Somalia, but equally in ‘peaceful’ African urban centers like Nairobi and Mombasa. Citizen-suspects contend both with the uncertainty that comes with their subjection to surveillance and suspicion, and with the knowledge that is needed to navigate the shape-shifting geographies of war/police power.