American Anthropologist | Commentaries | Samar Al-Bulushi (UC Irvine), Sahana Ghosh (Harvard University), and Madiha Tahir.

“…The radical transformations articulated in Jobson’s article seem to outline a universalizing politics that is at odds with the ethics of relationality that he calls for. In this essay, we highlight the American of American Anthropologist in order to contend with the ways the politics of location shape Jobson’s call for anthropology to adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon.”

Public Culture | Special Issue. Co-edited with journal editor, Shamus Khan, and wrote the Introduction.

“Sergeant Shamar Thomas chided the police repeatedly, ‘This is not a war zone!’… ‘If you want to go kill and hurt people, go to Iraq! Why are you hurting US citizens?’ …Thomas’s castigation of the police can be understood as reestablishing that distinction, and with it, he demarcates an ‘inside’ territory of the nation-state where violence must be regulated, and an ‘outside’ — Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Soma-lia, Pakistan, and elsewhere — where overwhelming violence can be enacted and justified.”

Public Culture

“The thing is, I’ve never been to Laarh. Till some months ago, I didn’t even know it existed. Then, one warm morning, a man turned up in Islamabad carrying his tale and his place, and I spent the next several weeks springing the name on people I met, friends, reporters, refugees, and acquaintances, in the hopes of scaring some information from them… His name was Mir Azad Khan, and on the tape, around the fifteen-minute mark, you can hear me repeating the place-name after him: ‘Lāṛ’.” But some weeks later when I met a man who knew the village…he said that it was called Luaṛā.”

Book chapter | Life in the Age of Drone Warfare. Eds. Lisa Parks & Caren Kaplan. Duke University Press 2017.

To produce the Tribal Areas as available for overwhelming force requires considerable effort on the ground.