Our Books
The corpus of work that IAIS has produced in the last five years is world leading....
Books by our departmental staff
States without People: revolt and defeat in the Middle East
The horizon of emancipatory politics is in ruins, scarred by defeats and ongoing conflicts. Under the auspices of technocapitalist elites and their political allies, a reactionary turn tightens its grip on the world. Civil wars and regional conflicts are surging. The Middle East has become the regional laboratory for a global reconfiguration of power. States Without People explores how revolts that preceded the outbreak of war have fostered a right-wing political culture. In a nuanced discussion of the defeat of popular revolts and the rise of mythological politics, hypermilitarism, and ethnosupremacism, Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi take readers into the phenomenological depths of citizen politics in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, across the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond. The book highlights three pivotal moments: the outbreak and defeat of popular revolts, the ensuing civil wars, and the complex displacement that has forced millions from their homes. States Without People advances a paradigm shift in state–citizen relations from the vantage point of the Middle East. In the state without people, there is no ideological space for a heterogeneous or self-contradictory citizenry – only for partisans, whose interests overlap with the state’s, and for enemies.
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Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy
Professor Laleh Khalili
Extractive Capitalism: Commodities, Cargo and Cronyism
Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalisation is still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made - and is still making - our unequal world.
Professor Laleh Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits. Piercing, wry and constantly revealing, Extractive Capitalism brings vividly to light the dark truths behind the world's most voracious industries.
Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
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How oil greases the wheels of global capitalism
This expansive history traces the hidden connections between oil and capitalism from the late 1800s to the current climate crisis. Beyond simplistic narratives that frame oil as 'prize' or 'curse', Crude Capitalism uncovers the surprising ways that oil is woven into the fabric of our modern world: the rise of an American-centered global order; the breakdown of Empire and anti-colonial rebellion; contemporary finance and US dollar hegemony; debt and militarism; and the emergence of new forms of synthetic consumption. Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil has a foundational place in all aspects of contemporary life - no challenge to the fossil fuel industry can be effective without taking this fact seriously.
Crude Capitalism maps the varied geographies of oil, including the rise of OPEC, the importance of revolutionary and Post-Soviet Russia, the crucial role of African upstream reserves, and the new petrochemical circuits that link the Middle East, China, and East Asia. The book provides an original and fine-grained empirical analysis of corporate ownership and control, including refining and petrochemicals.
By exposing these structures of power and placing oil in capitalism, the book makes an essential contribution to debates around oil-dependency and the struggle for climate justice.
Qayrawān The Amuletic City
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In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Tunisian city of Qayrawān suddenly found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why.
Using visual archaeological methods, William Gallois reconstructs the visual history of these works and vividly brings them back to life. He locates pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera. In Qayrawān, he identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing—which lay exclusively within the domains of women—onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.
Based on extensive archival research, this study is both a record of a unique moment in the history of art and a challenge to rethink the spiritual force and agency of a group of anonymous female artists whose paintings aspired to help save the world at a time of great peril. It will be welcomed by scholars of art history, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and the history of magic.
Palestine in a World on Fire
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A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.
As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.
Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the world: capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.
The Corporeal Life of Seafaring
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The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital new essay, scholar Laleh Khalili draws on her ongoing research and experiences of travelling on cargo ships to explore the embodied life of these labourers. She investigates an experience riddled with adversities – loneliness, loss, and violence, stolen wages and exploitative shipowners – as well as ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity. In the unique arena of the ship, Khalili traces the many forms of corporeality involved in work at sea and the ways the body is engaged by the institutions that engulf seafarers’ lives and work.
Illustrated throughout with the author’s own photographs, this book takes in both scholarly and literary accounts to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea. Drawing on the insights of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism, it centres the lives of those so often forgotten or dismissed in enterprises of capital accumulation and the raced and gendered hierarchies that shape them.
The Archaeology of Irrigation Technology and Water Management in the Islamic World: Proceedings of the Bahrain Conference, January 2024
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The archaeology of irrigation technology and water management encompasses a wide range of structures – subterranean tunnels (qanāts, falaj, foggara, ghayl etc.), reservoirs, cisterns, canals, aqueducts, tanks, fountains, water mills, wells, dams, barrages - in a variety of contexts - mountains, deserts, forests, agricultural, horticultural, urban, village, military, riverine, estuarine, coastal, lacustrine – and over a long time period from the seventh through to nineteenth centuries. However, in many areas the archaeology of these facilities remains little explored. This volume begins to rectify this through a variety of case studies examining the diverse ways that past populations have developed hydraulic infrastructure for moving and managing water across the Islamic World. It also considers how past human ingenuity in developing hydraulic infrastructure, now often fallen into disrepair and dis-use, could hold lessons for the present and offer solutions for the future as humanity faces the challenges of environmental and climate change.
A Political Anthropology of Yemen: Concept and Critique
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At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their lives. This volume is a call for an anthropology attuned not only to locally significant political concepts, but also to the ways in which people actively confront and reorient them while challenging their worlds and engaging the political imagination in a spirit of abiding critique. This concise collection is the fruit of decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen and will be of interest to students and scholars seeking an intimate and nuanced account of life in the country.
Israel on the Brink: Eight Steps for a Better Future
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In this timely book, historian Ilan Pappé argues that with the 2022 election of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, political fractures inherent in the Jewish state have expanded dangerously—and will potentially lead to Israel’s collapse. With the goal of working towards a transition that is as peaceful as possible, Pappé sets out his thoughts about the risks and opportunities emerging from this historical moment.
Eight “mini-revolutions,” he argues, will be necessary for this more hopeful future to emerge, including:
- Relocating the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the center of the future vision;
- Establishing a new definition for the Jewish collective in historical Palestine;
- Finalizing a plan for the future of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank since 1967; and
- Creating a new strategy for a united Palestinian national movement.
Pappé concretely envisions a more just future—a democratic decolonized state for both Palestinians and Israelis—and how we might get there.
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Songs of the Arabian Red Sea: A Cultural History
Song and music have always played an important part in the cultural identity of the mariners and coastal peoples of the Red Sea. While previous studies on the maritime culture of this region have focused on the sailing vessel, the dhow, and seafaring communities, this is the first book to examine its rich musical repertoire.
Using fieldwork conducted along the Hijaz and Upper Tihama coasts, The Songs of the Arabian Red Sea documents examples of different musical forms and styles as well as the stories of older mariners who describe the contexts in which songs were sung, from sea shanties during the working day to soulful ballads about home and loved ones at night. Presenting the songs and their lyrics in the context of the geography, culture, oral history and musicology of the region, the book reveals the complex and connected network that influenced their development and the vital place of song and music for diverse communities of the region.
Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine
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A materialist analysis of the links between global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression in Palestine
Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?
Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.
Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world – and what it demands of us today.
Islamic Archaeology in Global Perspective
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Islamic archaeology is expanding rapidly and Islamic Archaeology in Global Perspective
provides the first critical overview of the subject. No book has ever provided such a
comprehensive review of Islamic Archaeology and it will set the research agenda for years
to come.
The book is divided into three sections with the first section, Origins and Dynasties,
providing a chronological discussion of research on Islamic archaeological material from
the origins of Islam in the early 7th century to the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early
20th century, and primarily focuses on the Levant, Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt. The
second section, Conduits and Agents of Islamisation and Trade, examines the archaeology
of Indian Ocean and land-based trade and pilgrimage routes. The third section, Regions,
adopts a geographical approach in exploring North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily,
the sub-Saharan African regions of the West African Sahel and Sudan, and Ethiopia, South
and Southeast Asia, and Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.
With extensive use of illustrations and box texts throughout to consider particular themes,
technologies, and archaeological materials, such as types of ceramics, coins, and glass, this
book will be indispensable for all students and researchers of Islamic Archaeology and
Islamic Studies.