About
Mostafa Khalili is an Assistant Professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). Before joining TUFS, he served as an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University’s Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and held a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sophia University. He has also held several international visiting fellowships, including at the University of Oxford’s School of Global and Area Studies and at Sciences Po, where he conducted research on comparative minority politics in the Middle East.
His research focuses on the anthropology of ethnicity, boundary-making, and minority nationalism, with a regional emphasis on politically unstable borderlands. He has conducted extensive long-term fieldwork in the Kurdish tri-border regions of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, examining cross-border networks, political mobilization, and shifting forms of local authority.
His work has appeared in journals such as Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism and the Journal of Global Studies. He is currently completing his monograph on the everyday ethnicity of Kurmanji-speaking Kurds in Iran.
Expertise
Middle East, Ethnic Conflict, Minority Nationalism, Political Anthropology