Laleh Khalili 

Laleh Khalili is a professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. For her first book, “Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration” (2007) she conducted ethnographic research with Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Her second book, “Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies” (2013), drew on interviews with former detainees of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and various Israeli detention camps and prisons, and military officers, guards, and interrogators, as well as a large number of archival sources to show the continuities in practices of detention in liberal counterinsurgencies from the Boer War until today. She also edited “Modern Arab Politics” (2008) and co-edited (with Jillian Schwedler) “Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion” (Hurst/OUP, 2010). Her most recent book, “Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula” (Verso, 2020) includes travels aboard containership, port visits, archival work in more than a dozen archives, and a deep dive into the history of logistics and hydrocarbon ports of the Arabian Peninsula to understand the (trans)formations of capitalism there.