Zoltan Gluck

ZOLTAN GLUCK, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2020 to aid research and writing on “Recolonizing Security: An Anthropology of the War on Terror in Kenya.” The project is a study of Kenya’s War on Terror, examining the historical and contemporary context of the security practices and counterterrorism which are transforming cities, citizenship, and state power in Kenya. Since 1998 Kenya has experienced a number of “terrorist” attacks that have profoundly impacted the country, placing security at the center of national politics, transforming the Kenyan state, and changing the terrain and contours of struggles for social justice. By situating such recent social transformations within a longer historical context of colonial and postcolonial security governance and counterinsurgency, the book argues that such events are but the most recent iterations of “long war on terror” in East Africa. This “long war on terror” is a century-long project, whose counterrevolutionary core has been the undermining of African movements for autonomy, land, freedom and decolonization. Historical and ethnographic chapters examine the colonial origins of counterterrorism, the cultural and political aftermath of terrorist attacks, and state transformation as police, activists, elites and NGOs navigate the social and spatial processes of the so-called Global War on Terror.