Her regional interests are in Africa and the Middle East, focusing mainly on Sudan and Eritrea (where she has done research on women who were former guerrillas of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front).
Hale is the author of the book Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State.
Hale co-edited Sudan’s Killing Fields: Perspectives on Genocide, with Laura Beny.
Books where her chapters have appeared are: Gender, War and Militarism; Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East; Gender and Citizenship in Muslim Communities; Race and Identity in the Nile Valley, and Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge.
In an article about Hale's long lasting "self-imposed silence" regarding the issue of Female Genital Cutting or FGM, Ellen Gruenbaum discussed both Hale's "cautionary reasons" for not writing about this subject for many years,[2] as well as ways to positively engage in the discussion of this practice.