Laleh Khalili

 

April 30 – May 1, 2014

 

Laleh Khalili is Professor of Middle East Politics at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Khalili’s first book, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration(Cambridge 2007) drew on ethnographic research in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Barajna in Lebanon and focussed on the particular genres of commemoration – from the heroic practices of the heady days of Third Worldism to the tragic discourses of an era in which NGOs are ascendant. She also edited Modern Arab Politics (Routledge 2008) and co-edited (with Jillian Schwedler) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst/OUP 2010). Her most recent book is Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 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 Boer War until today.  Her Time in the Shadows was the winner of the Susan Strange Best Book Prize of the British International Studies Association.