#SomeoneTellCNN: Cosmopolitan militarism in the East African warscape

Abstract

In October 2011, the Kenyan military invaded southern Somalia with the stated purpose of addressing the threat posed by the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab. This article illustrates how the Kenyan state invokes the ongoing fight against Al-Shabaab to perform what Merje Kuus refers to as “cosmopolitan militarism,” shifting attention away from the material dimensions of war and geopolitics to more abstract, imaginative domains. Cosmopolitan militarism functions here as a form of nation branding, marking Kenya as exceptional for its commitment to liberal norms of peace and security. At the same time, I draw upon state-produced documents, advertisements, and public speeches and events to analyze how cultural production shapes subjectivities, cultivating new imaginative geographies, militarized masculinities, and religiously inflected attachments to war.

Emplacing capital

“…Yet it is important to precisely delineate the multiplicity and multitude of “southern” actors that compose these current geopolitical shifts in relation to contemporary capitalism (Al‐Bulushi 2019; Clarke 2010; Ebron 2008). Situating Nigeria in what I call its “Global South shift” both contextualizes Nigerian commercial terrains in its entrenched colonial economy while attending to a distinct shift toward elsewhere.…”

Race, space, and ‘terror’: Notes from East Africa

“…Meanwhile, the war against Al-Shabaab has provided a stage for the production of new fantasies and subjectivities about Kenya’s place in the world. Through carefully choreographed public events that celebrate Kenya’s commitment to liberal norms of peace and security, Kenya emerges as exceptional, standing apart from its purportedly uncivilized neighbors (Al-Bulushi, 2019). 7 For Kenyans, therefore, the war on terror is as much a cultural field of meaning and representation as it is a violent endeavor.…”