Dr Ali Kadri is a Senior Fellow at the Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy at LSE. Prior to his present position, he was a visiting fellow at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and the principal author of several United Nations reports addressing the right to development in Western Asia. In his current as well as his previous works, Kadri has focused on the issue of accumulation through destruction, the production of waste and militarism. He had argued that alongside war for strategic control of oil, war is also a form of production and an end in itself. In his book, ‘The Unmaking of Arab Socialism’, Kadri attributes the demise of Arab development to the subordination of the national bourgeoisie to American global power, its transformation into a comprador class prospering from setting ablaze its own national economy, and its adoption of neoliberalism. He shows that the destructive tendencies of imperialism in the Arab world and Africa are neither accidental nor historically contingent, but systemic and necessarily rooted in the global crisis of overproduction.

His most recent work, The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World, (2017), compares the development experience of these respective regions. He is currently working on two topics: the theory of forced labour migration and the replicability of the Chinese development model to other developing countries.