Samar Al-Bulushi is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Her current book project, War-Making as World-Making, argues that Africa remains marginal to current understandings of race and imperial warfare. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kenya to explore the cultural and material dimensions of the ongoing war against the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, she argues that post 9/11 war-making has become a form of world-making, as African states reconfigure and rebrand violence work — previously a marker of otherness — as a symbol of cosmopolitan modernity. The book takes seriously the range of actors on the continent who co-constitute, and in some cases resist imperial warfare.

Al-Bulushi is a former contributing editor at Africa is a Country and has published in a variety of public outlets on topics ranging from the International Criminal Court to the militarization of U.S. policy in Africa. Her writing and interviews have appeared in The Intercept, Teen Vogue, Democracy Now!, Africa is a Country, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Pambazuka, Review of African Political Economy, and Warscapes.

Al-Bulushi received her BA at Columbia University, her MA from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and her PhD in anthropology from Yale University.