Examining the Global South’s growing assertiveness on the global stage is the focus of a new two-year project being led by Samar Al-Bulushi, University of California, Irvine anthropology assistant professor. Funded by a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, she’ll work in partnership with Security in Context, an interdisciplinary network of international scholars that approaches discussions of security from a Global South perspective. Together, they’ll conduct in-depth scholarly research, convene stakeholder meetings, attend relevant summits and policy gatherings, and convene an international conference at UC Irvine featuring scholars, policymakers, and activists.

In recent years, a growing number of Global South states have sought to address what they perceive as an unequal world order plagued by double standards. This raises new questions about the future of global governance, says Al-Bulushi. “While it is clear that the world is trending toward multipolarity, we still need a deeper understanding of what this will look like concretely,” she says. The primary focus of the work will be on the African continent as a lens through which to understand multipolarity from the “bottom-up,” she says, “as it manifests in regions where external powers are competing for influence yet forced to respond to push back from local politicians, intellectuals, and activists alike.”  

UC Irvine is uniquely positioned to host this project because of the growing number of faculty whose research interests are not confined to area studies frameworks, and instead focus on transregional dynamics in and across the Global South. For her part, Al-Bulushi’s newly released book addresses Kenya’s role in the war on terror; her more recent research explores the racial hierarchies and uneven power dynamics that animate the social-relational worlds of the political elite on the global stage.

She joined the UCI faculty in 2019 following completion of her Ph.D. at Yale in 2017. Prior to that, she earned an M.A. in international affairs at Columbia University and spent ten years working in international human rights.

The main questions Al-Bulushi and researchers will aim to address include:

• How do political elites, intellectuals, and activists in different parts of the Global South view the emerging multipolar order, how do these differ from each other and from those in the West?
• What issues do they prioritize and what do they believe needs to change?

“There has been considerable attention paid to Great Power competition,” says Al-Bulushi, “but the interests and drivers animating elites and other local actors’ behavior in and across the Global South have yet to be adequately considered. This project aims to fill this gap.”

Funding for this work begins in October and runs through September 2026.