Laurie King

Member of the Board of Directors, Arab Center Washington DC

Laurie King, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and human rights advocate who focuses primarily on Palestine and Lebanon. King is a teaching professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Anthropology. She conducted her doctoral dissertation field research on a Fulbright grant in Nazareth, Israel from 1991-1993 on political identity, urban governance, and the anthropology of affect among Palestinian citizens of Israel. From 1993-1998, King lived and worked in Beirut, Lebanon, where she conducted field research and did journalistic writing on post-war reconciliation, human rights, and urban reconstruction. From 1998-2001 she was editor-in-chief of Middle East Report, the quarterly publication of MERIP, in Washington, DC., before moving to Victoria, British Columbia where she taught anthropology at the University of Victoria. King has also served as managing editor for the Journal of Palestine Studies (2007-2009), and continues to do consulting work and editing for the Institute for Palestine Studies. In addition, she was one of the four co-founders of the award-winning alternative news website, The Electronic Intifada, and coordinated media and outreach for the International Committee for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila during the landmark legal attempt to bring the architects of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres to justice in Belgium under the principle of Universal Jurisdiction. King is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Universal Jurisdiction for Humanitarian Crimes: A Retrospective Ethnography of Belgium’s Legal Experiment,  a multi-site ethnographic account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre survivors’ legal case that took place in  Belgium between 2000-2003.