Professor Laleh Khalili (she/her)

I made my way to a PhD in politics by way of an undergraduate degree in engineering and after working for some years as a management consultant in the US. I have been, throughout my scholarly career, compelled with and curious about the workings of transnational movements: of colonial forms of power and violence, of resistance, of ideas and practices, of people, and now of capital and cargo. I have always woven through analyses of gender, racialisation, political violence and political economy in my research, and have been particularly fascinated by both the ongoing violence of empire and the afterlives of colonialism in contemporary politics.

I have examined the representations and practices of violence in my first two book, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency (Stanford 2013) as well as in a volume I co-edited with Jillian Schwedler, titled Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010). My book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. A complementary long essay/mini-book, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books 2024) attends more closely to the everyday experiences of seafarers on modern mega-freighters. I have also written article (in edited volumes, journals, museum catalogues and magazines) on a range of subjects from the politics of pleasure and gendered subjectivities to trade, finance, collective memory, and the role of happiness in counterinsurgencies, inter alia. I am currently putting the finishing touches on a book of collected essays tentatively titled Extractive Capitalism (Profile Books forthcoming) and planning other projects, on the afterlives of oil and gas after their nationalisation in the Middle East, and on the lifeways and infrastructures of food in martime cultures.

Education

2005 Ph.D. Political Science with distinction, Columbia University

Dissertation: Citizens of an Unborn Kingdom: Stateless Palestinian Refugees and Contentious Commemoration

Dissertation Committee: Lisa Anderson, Ira Katznelson, Rashid Khalidi, Anthony Marx, Charles Tilly

1999 Master of International Affairs, School of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University

1991 B.Sc. Chemical Engineering, University of Texas

Books

2025 Extractive Capitalism: Commodities, Cargo and Cronyism (Profile, forthcoming)

2024 The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books).

2020 Sinews of War and Trade (Verso).

Paperback edition with a new foreword issued in 2021.

2013 Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press).

Awarded the Susan Strange Best Book Award 2012 by the British International Studies Association;

Winner of the 2014 Best Book award of the International Political Sociology section of the ISA;

Selected as an “Outstanding Academic Title” of 2013 by Choice.

2007 Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge University Press).

Edited Volumes

2010 Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion. Co-edited with Jillian Schwedler (Hurst & Co./Oxford University Press).

2008 Politics of the Modern Arab World: Critical Concepts, Volumes I through IV (Routledge). Individual volumes are titled (I) State, Power and Political Economy; (II) Gender, Society, Culture; (III) Political and Social Movements; and (IV) International Politics and War.