Anthropology Colloquium Series - Samar Al-Bulushi

NEW WORLD DIS/ORDERINGS?

KEYWORDS IN THE STUDY OF SHIFTING GEOPOLITICAL LANDSCAPES, FROM THE MEDITERRANEAN TO THE RED SEA AND BEYOND

At a time punctuated by growing debate about the potential erosion of US hegemony and the dawn of a “uniquely dangerous period of world history,” there is a need to scrutinize the very terms of such debates. In a dialogue between political anthropologists Samar Al-Bulushi and Fiori Berhane, this event will explore how Euro- American policymakers and think tanks reinforce conceptual imaginaries of discrete states and regions, obscuring relational histories.

Focusing on the social construction of knowledge about the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, they will examine how the ability to define certain phenomena and to naturalize those definitions as common sense is itself a form of power that requires critical attention in this moment. They will discuss how an anthropology of geopolitics has the potential to unsettle prevailing conceptual frames, and to reveal other sets of actors whose knowledge is relevant to understandings of the current conjuncture, recognizing that worldmaking has never been the exclusive preserve of political elites in the Global North.

Samar Al-Bulushi - Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine & Author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024). Her research examines political and economic developments in the Red Sea, focusing on foreign military installations, maritime ports, and the at times violent securing of global trade. She leads UCI’s Global South and the World Order initiative, funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.

Fiori S. Berhane - Assistant Professor of Anthropology at USC & Author of Movements Against Crisis: Eritrean Migrant Activism Across the Mediterranean (forthcoming, Stanford University Press). A political and legal anthropologist, she studies migrant activism, border infrastructures, colonial legacies, and racial politics in Italy and across the Mediterranean. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Migration and Society, and Africa Is a Country. She is a member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective.