Dr Mostafa Khalili
Mostafa Khalili is an Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He previously held a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sophia University and served as a Research Associate at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Chiba University.
Trained in both engineering and the social sciences, he holds dual doctorates in Global Studies and Global Resource Management. His research sits at the intersection of political anthropology, ethnicity, and nationalism, with a particular focus on minority politics in conflict-affected regions. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Kurdish communities in the tri-border areas of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.
His work challenges essentialist paradigms of ethnonational conflict by foregrounding local agency, ambivalence, and the relational dynamics of identity. He is currently completing his first monograph, which examines the everyday lived experiences and contested meanings of ethnic identity among the Kurds.
