Laleh Khalili
Biographic Data
| ID | 306036 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laleh Khalili |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laleh |
| FAMILY NAME | Khalili |
| SIGNATURE | KHALILI L |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8226-037X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 407 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy
Political struggles in Durban and Palestine: On Sharad Chari’s Apartheid Remains
Book Symposium Dedicated to The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State,1 by Rizwaan Sabir
completing a Master's degree in International Relations in 2008, aimed to pursue doctoral study on political Islam and al-Qaeda.Reported to counterterrorism police in May of that year by non-academic staff at the University of Nottingham for possessing a copy of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual downloaded lawfully for this study, he ended up researching another form of terrorism: that of the UK security state directed against British Muslims in its c…
Crude Knowledge: Petro-Periodicals and Resource Sovereignty
The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter p…
Author’s Response: Oceanic Politics
Forum on Rahul Rao’s Out of Time, Part III: Hopeful Lines? – Method and Style
In this Forum, six scholars reflect on Rahul Rao’s recent book Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality from other geographies, themes and radical possibilities. Part III explores the way Out of Time traces out its argument, focusing especially on Rao’s meaning-making, the care by which he makes distinctions and ambiguities, and the intimacy of his prose. In the first section, Laleh Khalili shows that generosity is key to the book’s met…
Humanitarianism and racial capitalism in the age of global shipping
In what ways does humanitarianism uphold racial capitalism? The article draws on and expands Cedric Robinson’s arguments about the relationship between humanitarianism and racial capitalism in his Black Marxism. It does so by focusing on the Mission to Seafarers in the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The Mission has worked alongside state institutions and businesses, both before and after independence from Britain, to facilitate maritime t…
On Transnational and International History
In 2006, the American Historical Review published “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” and it remains to date among the journal’s most downloaded articles.1 The conversation featured six established historians discussing the so-called transnational turn in the discipline, offering reflections on both the many possibilities and the challenges of researching and writing history that moved across traditional geographic divisions. Nearly two…
Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World
Scholars Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili engage in a lively discussion that explores the political stakes of infrastructural projects, the organizing logics that infrastructures advance and curtail, and the importance of highlighting the forms of labor, protest, and "making do" that are shaped by and in infrastructure's long shadows. They also discuss the possibilities of world-building that move us away from the logics of spatial containment tha…
Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial
Book Review Forum on Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial /Somdeep Sen. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press. x and171 pp. $25.95 paper (ISBN 978-1501752742); $65.55 cloth (ISBN 978-1501752735)
On the politics of oceanic knowledge production
Oceans of Finance and Commodification
In this essay Khalili surveys the maritime as a space of commodification and of creation of new financial forms and instruments. Maritime transportation made possible the colonization of the Americas, Asia, and Africa and the enslavement and transoceanic commodification of millions of humans. Since then, not just what is transported upon the deep, but the sea itself has also been commodified. The seas’ geophysical contours, their seabeds, the spe…
Carceral Seas
F redrik M eiton . Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation
The recent efflorescence in studies of infrastructure in the global South have immeasurably enriched our understanding not only of processes of capital accumulation but also of political struggles and transformations around such infrastructures. The most exciting recent writings show that electricity and electrification, perhaps more than any category of infrastructures other than railroads, embody the complexities of social relations and power s…
The infrastructural power of the military: The geoeconomic role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula
In analysing the role of the US in the global expansion of capitalist relations, most critical accounts see the US military’s invasion and conquest of various states as paving the way for the arrival of US businesses and capitalist relations. However, beyond this somewhat simplified image, and even in peacetime, the US military has been a major geoeconomic actor that has wielded its infrastructural power via its US Army Corps of Engineers’ overse…
Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics
Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic an…
Pacifying Urban Insurrections
David Kilcullen, an Australian soldier-scholar who acted as counterinsurgency advisor to both the Pentagon and the State Department in the us War on Terror, is refashioning himself as an expert on geospatial security and urban crises. His Out of the Mountains is a Malthusian account of urban disorder in the global South, in what he calls ‘crowded, complex, and coastal’ cities as a terrain of future asymmetric warfare. This review situates his wor…
The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing
Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnogra…
The Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies
This essay examines the instrumentalization of emotions and affect—especially of happiness—in evaluating the outcome of counterinsurgencies. Traditionally, metrics and statistics have been utilized as the main means of measuring the achievement of military goals. However, given the centrality of noncombatant populations in counterinsurgencies, military theorists have increasingly sought to incorporate culture and intuition in their arsenal of tac…
Thinking about Violence
Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: "Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?" and "Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East." Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or em…
Water
Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies
Time in the Shadows examines the counterinsurgencies of our time, tracing their ancestry, to offer a critical reading of the mechanisms by which today's counterinsurgents—foremost the United States and Israel—reproduce illiberal regimes of domination while noisily declaring their liberal intent to liberate and improve.
In Exile
Lebanon's Camps
The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies
Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for co…
Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics
Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic an…
Gendered practices of counterinsurgency
Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted - for violence or 'nation-building' - on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incen…
The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies
Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for co…
The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing
Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnogra…
The infrastructural power of the military: The geoeconomic role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula
In analysing the role of the US in the global expansion of capitalist relations, most critical accounts see the US military’s invasion and conquest of various states as paving the way for the arrival of US businesses and capitalist relations. However, beyond this somewhat simplified image, and even in peacetime, the US military has been a major geoeconomic actor that has wielded its infrastructural power via its US Army Corps of Engineers’ overse…
G Rass-Roots C Ommemorations: R Emembering the L and in the C Amps of L Ebanon
The Oslo negotiations——and the specter of a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return——greatly increased the insecurities of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The new uncertainties in turn triggered the emergence in the refugee camps of commemorative practices different from those previously sponsored by the Palestinian leadership. The new forms of commemoration, centered on the villages left behind in Palestine in 1948 and including popular…
Heroic and Tragic Pasts: Mnemonic Narratives in the Palestinian Refugee Camps 1
To contest exile and political exclusion, Palestinian refugees have invoked their past as both a constitutive component of their identity and as a basis of their political claim-making; but they have done so in historically situated and discursively diverse ways. In this article I examine the oppositional performances at work when the heroic national past is invoked, or alternatively, when capital victimaire is acquired through narratives of suff…
The Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies
This essay examines the instrumentalization of emotions and affect—especially of happiness—in evaluating the outcome of counterinsurgencies. Traditionally, metrics and statistics have been utilized as the main means of measuring the achievement of military goals. However, given the centrality of noncombatant populations in counterinsurgencies, military theorists have increasingly sought to incorporate culture and intuition in their arsenal of tac…
Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian Commemoration in the Refugee Camps of Lebanon
Research Article| May 01 2005 Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian Commemoration in the Refugee Camps of Lebanon Laleh Khalili Laleh Khalili Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005) 25 (1): 30–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-1-30 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Laleh Khalili; Places of Memory and Mourning: …
Thinking about Violence
Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: "Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?" and "Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East." Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or em…
Standing with My Brother: Hizbullah, Palestinians, and the Limits of Solidarity
On 30 January 2004, after months of negotiations between Hizbullah and the state of Israel via German mediators, a major exchange of bodies and prisoners was completed. In return for a kidnapped Israeli citizen-alleged to belong to Israeli intelligence services-and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers captured three years previously, Israel released twenty-nine Lebanese and other Arab prisoners, the remains of fifty-nine Lebanese citizens, and, a…
Humanitarianism and racial capitalism in the age of global shipping
In what ways does humanitarianism uphold racial capitalism? The article draws on and expands Cedric Robinson’s arguments about the relationship between humanitarianism and racial capitalism in his Black Marxism. It does so by focusing on the Mission to Seafarers in the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The Mission has worked alongside state institutions and businesses, both before and after independence from Britain, to facilitate maritime t…
Carceral Seas
Water
Oceans of Finance and Commodification
In this essay Khalili surveys the maritime as a space of commodification and of creation of new financial forms and instruments. Maritime transportation made possible the colonization of the Americas, Asia, and Africa and the enslavement and transoceanic commodification of millions of humans. Since then, not just what is transported upon the deep, but the sea itself has also been commodified. The seas’ geophysical contours, their seabeds, the spe…
The Gendered Embroilments of War
Book Symposium Dedicated to The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State,1 by Rizwaan Sabir
completing a Master's degree in International Relations in 2008, aimed to pursue doctoral study on political Islam and al-Qaeda.Reported to counterterrorism police in May of that year by non-academic staff at the University of Nottingham for possessing a copy of the Al-Qaeda Training Manual downloaded lawfully for this study, he ended up researching another form of terrorism: that of the UK security state directed against British Muslims in its c…
Crude Knowledge: Petro-Periodicals and Resource Sovereignty
The period of struggle over hydrocarbon sovereignty in the Arab world –the 1950s-1970s– saw a spate of periodicals in Arabic about oil. These included periodicals produced by the public relations departments of Euro-American oil companies, as well as monthlies, weeklies and quarterlies produced by Arab journalists, experts, and former oil revolutionaries in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut and Kuwait. This essay argues that the trajectory of these latter p…
Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World
Scholars Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili engage in a lively discussion that explores the political stakes of infrastructural projects, the organizing logics that infrastructures advance and curtail, and the importance of highlighting the forms of labor, protest, and "making do" that are shaped by and in infrastructure's long shadows. They also discuss the possibilities of world-building that move us away from the logics of spatial containment tha…
On the politics of oceanic knowledge production
Collective Interventions the Iron Wall
Haddad: The Palestinian Impasse in Lebanon and Klaus: Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon——Where to Belong
Additional informationNotes on contributorsLaleh KhaliliLaleh Khalili is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Columbia University. The title of her soon-to-be-completed doctoral dissertation is Citizens of an Unborn Kingdom: Stateless Palestinian Refugees and Contentious Commemoration
G Rass-Roots C Ommemorations: R Emembering the L and in the C Amps of L Ebanon
The Oslo negotiations——and the specter of a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return——greatly increased the insecurities of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The new uncertainties in turn triggered the emergence in the refugee camps of commemorative practices different from those previously sponsored by the Palestinian leadership. The new forms of commemoration, centered on the villages left behind in Palestine in 1948 and including popular…
A Landscape of Uncertainly: Palestiniana in Lebanon
Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian Commemoration in the Refugee Camps of Lebanon
Research Article| May 01 2005 Places of Memory and Mourning: Palestinian Commemoration in the Refugee Camps of Lebanon Laleh Khalili Laleh Khalili Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2005) 25 (1): 30–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-25-1-30 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Laleh Khalili; Places of Memory and Mourning: …
Collective Interventions the Iron Wall
Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration
Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyr…
Understanding Islam in Politics
In the last few years, an ever-expanding body of scholarship in a variety of disciplines has tried to explain Islamism,1 where it comes from, its contours and varieties, how it imbues and influence
Heroic and Tragic Pasts: Mnemonic Narratives in the Palestinian Refugee Camps 1
To contest exile and political exclusion, Palestinian refugees have invoked their past as both a constitutive component of their identity and as a basis of their political claim-making; but they have done so in historically situated and discursively diverse ways. In this article I examine the oppositional performances at work when the heroic national past is invoked, or alternatively, when capital victimaire is acquired through narratives of suff…
Standing with My Brother: Hizbullah, Palestinians, and the Limits of Solidarity
On 30 January 2004, after months of negotiations between Hizbullah and the state of Israel via German mediators, a major exchange of bodies and prisoners was completed. In return for a kidnapped Israeli citizen-alleged to belong to Israeli intelligence services-and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers captured three years previously, Israel released twenty-nine Lebanese and other Arab prisoners, the remains of fifty-nine Lebanese citizens, and, a…
Commemorating Battles and Massacres in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Lebanon
An ethnographic and diachronic examination of the commemoration of violent events- battles and massacres-in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon shows the shift in mnemonic frames that helps one to understand political contention and strategies of struggle. The transformations in the representation and remembrance of battles and massacres in response to particular audiences and contexts reveal the dynamic and constructed nature of commemorative p…
The Gendered Embroilments of War
The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies
Since at least the 1930s, Palestine has had a continuous role as a laboratory of counterinsurgency. During the British Mandate, Palestine saw a consolidation of the techniques of imperial policing and the development of a complex military-legal apparatus of control, from “security fences” and watchtowers to mass incarceration and collective punishment to emergency laws and administrative detention. Palestine has continued to be the setting for co…
Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion
The emergence of the modern Middle East has been accompanied by a concentration of coercive power in the state. Although the region has encompassed numerous Mukhabarat (secret police) states, extensive policing and carceral regimes, and widespread use of torture and spectacular punishments, and although its prisons and policing practices are regularly condemned by human rights organisations, surprisingly few analyses explore the emergence of thes…
Gendered practices of counterinsurgency
Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted - for violence or 'nation-building' - on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incen…
Lebanon's Camps
Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies
Time in the Shadows examines the counterinsurgencies of our time, tracing their ancestry, to offer a critical reading of the mechanisms by which today's counterinsurgents—foremost the United States and Israel—reproduce illiberal regimes of domination while noisily declaring their liberal intent to liberate and improve.
In Exile
Thinking about Violence
Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: "Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?" and "Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East." Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or em…
Water
The Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies
This essay examines the instrumentalization of emotions and affect—especially of happiness—in evaluating the outcome of counterinsurgencies. Traditionally, metrics and statistics have been utilized as the main means of measuring the achievement of military goals. However, given the centrality of noncombatant populations in counterinsurgencies, military theorists have increasingly sought to incorporate culture and intuition in their arsenal of tac…
The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing
Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnogra…
Pacifying Urban Insurrections
David Kilcullen, an Australian soldier-scholar who acted as counterinsurgency advisor to both the Pentagon and the State Department in the us War on Terror, is refashioning himself as an expert on geospatial security and urban crises. His Out of the Mountains is a Malthusian account of urban disorder in the global South, in what he calls ‘crowded, complex, and coastal’ cities as a terrain of future asymmetric warfare. This review situates his wor…
The infrastructural power of the military: The geoeconomic role of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Arabian Peninsula
In analysing the role of the US in the global expansion of capitalist relations, most critical accounts see the US military’s invasion and conquest of various states as paving the way for the arrival of US businesses and capitalist relations. However, beyond this somewhat simplified image, and even in peacetime, the US military has been a major geoeconomic actor that has wielded its infrastructural power via its US Army Corps of Engineers’ overse…
Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics
Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic an…
F redrik M eiton . Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation
The recent efflorescence in studies of infrastructure in the global South have immeasurably enriched our understanding not only of processes of capital accumulation but also of political struggles and transformations around such infrastructures. The most exciting recent writings show that electricity and electrification, perhaps more than any category of infrastructures other than railroads, embody the complexities of social relations and power s…
Political science (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Politics (17 works) · History (14 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (14 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts (9 works) · Ancient history (8 works)