The Bosnian War, Jihad, and American Empire

In this episode, anthropologist and lawyer Darryl Li discusses his new book The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Based on ethnographic and archival research, the work explores the Bosnian jihad, in which several thousand Muslim volunteers ventured to the area to fight in response to the mass atrocities against Muslims in the midst of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995. Through this lens, Li critically engages with many of the omnipresent yet unexamined concepts associated with Muslim mobility and jihad. Or, as he pithily put it, he aimed "to write a book about jihad that didn't suck." With this goal in mind, he offers a perspective on the Bosnian jihad on its own terms. Highlighting the jihad as a universalist project, he moreover reveals unexpected intersections, including everything from South-South legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement to Habsburg Neo-Moorish design confused for Ottoman architecture to Sufi-Salafi alliances. He also grapples with the long shadows cast on Muslim mobility by the US-created global network of prisons in the context of the Global War on Terror.