In the last year I also wrote 3 pieces for the LRB:
“We Blitzed It: Inhabiting the Oil World” on the everyday entanglements of oil
“In Sharm-El-Sheikh” on COP27
and one of my favourites, “In Clover: What Does McKinsey Do” on the business of management consulting
Over the course of the last year, I have had such immense fun doing a bunch of different podcasts and other interviews and presentations. Below is a list with links:
The fabulous Ottoman History Podcast with Matthew Ghazarian: Shipping and Empire Around the Arabian Peninsula: Part 1 and Part 2
Corporeal Life of Commerce – lecture and panel at Casa Árabe in Madrid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNdw2OwZRuQ
De Dependance Podcast – On Big Ship Capitalism: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6F1CXeBUm5r3MX4a9c3bep
On the fabulous Material Crimes podcast – on “the Train to Nowhere”: https://materialcrimes.com/A-Train-to-Nowhere
On Jadaliyya’s Connections podcast with the fabulous (and fabulously attired) Mouin Rabbani: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44701/Connections-Episode-47-From-COP27-to-The-World-Cup-with-Laleh-Khalili-Video
On the LRB podcast with wonderful Thomas Jones on management consultants: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/what-do-management-consultants-do
On the Belabored podcast of Dissent magazine with Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-winning-in-logistics-work-with-michelle-valentin-and-laleh-khalili-amazon
I wrote about the business managerial pretensions of former special operators for the LRB: https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/laleh-khalili/stupid-questions
And then had a chat with Thomas Jones on their podcast: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/the-special-forces-fantasy
Spoke to lovely lefties in Denmark and the Netherlands:
Laleh Khalili: Sandheden om vor tids kapitalisme udstilles på verdenshavene
Langsomme samtaler med Rune Lykkeberg
Professor i international politik ved Queens Mary University har undersøgt den maritime kapitalisme og de forsyningskæder, som er forudsætninger for vores vækst og velstand. Hun har sejlet med de store containerskibe og set de nye kolossale industrihavne, studeret de økonomiske og juridiske magtforhold og skrevet en fremragende bog om det. Hun fortæller i denne langsomme samtale om den beskidte og brutale virkelighed på havet, som ellers er den usynlige del af vores verdensøkonomi.
Lyt i Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/langsomme-samtaler-med-rune-lykkeberg/id1534708499?i=1000548365913
And
If you want to know what is wrong with our global economy, you should look to the sea, think researchers Laleh Khalili and Alex Colás. Here you will find the excesses of global capitalism – and the solutions.
https://decorrespondent.nl/13067/een-betere-wereld-begint-op-zee/38825993799626-b7697263
“Instead of treating the ocean as a space for frictionless accumulation, can we imagine a “blue new deal” that refuses to carve up water into routes and resources controlled by the most powerful?
This episode features insights from Tina Ngata, an advocate for environmental, Indigenous and human rights based in Te Ika A Maui (the North Island of New Zealand), Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, Elif Saracan, an activist for the Kurdish Womens Movement, and Elizabeth Johnson, a Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University.” https://novaramedia.com/2021/11/04/planet-b-everything-must-change-water/
My interview can be listened to here: https://soundcloud.com/rosaluxstiftung/planet-b-laleh-khalili-on-sovereignty-and-seafarers
I got to talk to the brilliant Luke de Noronha of the Sarah Parker Redmond Centre at UCL. The Soundcloud is here and the transcript can be found here:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-laleh-khalili
I reviewed Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s fabulous book on Commodity Traders:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n18/laleh-khalili/how-to-get-rich
Extract:
When ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, published Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965, it was already clear that the newly independent states were going to have to fight to be allowed to be economically self-sufficient. ‘Decolonisation,’ Nkrumah wrote,
“is a word much and unctuously used by imperialist spokesmen to describe the transfer of political control from colonialist to African sovereignty. The motive spring of colonialism, however, still controls the sovereignty. The young countries are still the providers of raw materials, the old of manufactured goods … Colonialism has achieved a new guise … And neo-colonialism is fast entrenching itself within the body of Africa today through the consortia and monopoly combinations that are carpetbaggers of the African revolt against colonialism.”
The new markets for primary commodities were engineered by those carpetbaggers, the merchants and traders who took advantage of the desperation of newly decolonised and impoverished states which were rich in commodities. Rich cultivated relationships with the conservative government in Jamaica, offering much needed oil in return for shipments of bauxite and even advancing cash to repay Jamaica’s IMF loan. The arrangement led in 1985 to a ten-year contract whereby Jamaica sold alumina to Rich + Co at 25 per cent below market price. A profitable trade followed: he supplied this cheaply bought commodity to Jamaica’s smelters and received finished aluminium products. With Jamaica on the verge of economic collapse, its politicians were grateful for this daylight robbery.
George Monbiot of the Guardian quoted from this piece here:
As Laleh Khalili explains in the London Review of Books, the extractive colonial economy never ended. It continues through commodity traders working with kleptocrats and oligarchs, grabbing poor nations’ resources without payment with the help of clever instruments such as “transfer pricing”. It persists through the use of offshore tax havens and secrecy regimes by corrupt elites, who drain their nation’s wealth then channel it into “English funds”, whose true ownership is hidden by shell companies.
The Economist did an interesting podcast on the containership and they spoke to me and a bunch of very cool people:
So excited to have seen Sinews of War and Trade reviewed by the amazing Charmaine Chua for Boston Review, by John Lanchester for the LRB, and by Linda Roland Danil for LARB.
A half-hour long programme/podcast about abandoned seafarers in the Middle East.
The Gamming 