Laleh Khalili

Laleh Khalili is Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at IAIS, University of Exeter. In her first two books, 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 she co-edited with Jillian Schwedler, titled Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010) Laleh has examined the representations and practices of violence .  In her Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) she examines the role of maritime infrastructures as conduits of movement of technologies, capital, people and cargo. Her Corpreal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books 2024) draws on her ethnography and photography aboard container ships to think about the intimate lives of seafarers. She is currently working on a larger project about the lifeworlds of petroleum. The project will range across the decades and continents to examine how the production of and trade in oil and gas has transformed regimes of labour and property, international law, insurance and finance, and science and technology. The first set of essays out of this larger project is published in Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Profile Books 2025).