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.
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