The Logistics of Life and Death in Iran, Yemen and Palestine

In the third annual lecture of the UvA's Research Priority Area (RPA) Decolonial Futures, Prof. Laleh Khalili (Professor of Gulf Studies, University of Exeter) will be speaking on 'The Logistics of Life and Death in Iran, Yemen and Palestine'. To illuminate the centrality of energy politics and settler/colonial regimes of power to US commercial and military mastery over West Asia, this talk maps energy corridors and logistical straits, the struggles over which have dominated the news media in the last six months. By examining the modalities of state and nonstate asymmetric contention, she will discuss how the US/Israeli war on Iran and Yemen has shown the extent to which the less powerful states here have harnessed the very logics of US imperial hegemony – the gargantuan size and visibility of its military, its custody of global circulations of cargo and capital, and the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of dollar-denominated investment and commerce- against it.

Date & Time: Wednesday 2 December, 16:00-17:30 (doors open at 15:30, talk followed by a reception)
Location: @droog | Staalstraat 7B, 1011 JJ, Amsterdam

Please RSVP using the link below or send an email to: decolonialfutures@uva.nl 

About the Speaker

Laleh Khalili is Professor of Gulf Studies at University of Exeter. Her work focuses on 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 through analyses of gender, racialisation, political violence and political economy.
She is particularly fascinated by both the ongoing violence of empire and the afterlives of colonialism in contemporary politics. She has published widely 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.

Her publications include Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency (Stanford 2013), and the co-edited volume (with Jillian Schwedler), Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst 2010). Her book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020) examined 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. Her most recent publication is a series of collected essays titled Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Profile Books 2025) 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.

Please note that this talk will be recorded and shared online on the RPA website. If you have any privacy concerns or prefer not to appear in the recording, please let us know well in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.