The Mosaic Rooms, supported by Free Word, are delighted to present Laleh Khalili who will discuss her new book which chronicles the detention and confinement, of both combatants and large groups of civilians, from colonial times to present day. Khalili will be in conversation with Guardian’s investigative reporter, Ian Cobain.

In Time in the Shadows, Laleh Khalili investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria. Khalili argues that whatever the form of incarceration—visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians—liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements

Laleh Khalili is Reader in Middle East Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (2007) and coeditor of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (2010).

Ian Cobain has been a journalist for more than 30 years and is currently an investigative reporter with The Guardian. His work has included an examination of the UK’s involvement in the unlawful detention and mistreatment of detainees since September 2001 and in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. He has won the Martha Gellhorn Prize, the Paul Foot Award and a number of Amnesty International media awards, as well as a human rights award from Liberty and a Political Book Award.

FREE, RSVP here