Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS)
Established in 2005, the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar is a premier research institute devoted to the academic study of regional and international issues through dialogue and exchange of ideas, research and scholarship, and engagement with national and international scholars, opinion-makers, practitioners, and activists.
Guided by the principles of academic excellence, forward vision, and community engagement, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) mission revolves around five principal goals:
-To provide a forum for scholarship and research on international and regional affairs
-To encourage in-depth examination and exchange of ideas
-To foster thoughtful dialogue among students, scholars and practitioners of international affairs
-To facilitate the free flow of ideas and knowledge through publishing the products of its research, sponsoring conferences and seminars, and holding workshops designed to explore the complexities of the twenty-first century
-To engage in outreach activities with a wide range of local, regional and international partners.
Phone: Tel +974 4457 8400 Fax +974 4457 8401
Address: Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar
P.O.Box 23689
Doha, Qatar
Guided by the principles of academic excellence, forward vision, and community engagement, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) mission revolves around five principal goals:
-To provide a forum for scholarship and research on international and regional affairs
-To encourage in-depth examination and exchange of ideas
-To foster thoughtful dialogue among students, scholars and practitioners of international affairs
-To facilitate the free flow of ideas and knowledge through publishing the products of its research, sponsoring conferences and seminars, and holding workshops designed to explore the complexities of the twenty-first century
-To engage in outreach activities with a wide range of local, regional and international partners.
Phone: Tel +974 4457 8400 Fax +974 4457 8401
Address: Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar
P.O.Box 23689
Doha, Qatar
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Summary Reports by Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS)
marginalization in the Middle East have prompted many regional observers to conclude that socioeconomically disadvantaged Middle Eastern youth are more prone to radicalization and thereby constitute a threat to national and international security. The general consensus in these accounts is that low levels of occupational opportunities leave poor youth more disposed to frustration and fatalism, which in turn are strongly linked to radical politics. Alternatively, scholars in the language of rational choice argue that these young people engage in a deliberate calculation of means and ends in order to attain the power and wealth necessary for upward mobility. These scholars posit poor youth as rational, autonomous agents whose goals are defined by individual interests and preferences. However, these respective theories are unable to account for 1) the absence of political radicalism among poor youth in many countries of the Middle East, and 2) the presence of seemingly irrational acts among these youth that neither maximize self-interest, nor necessarily reflect individual preferences. Given the shortcomings of each of these prevailing theories, this paper, instead, synthesizes these two approaches and assesses the social conduct of poor youth in the Middle East from the perspective of aspirations-bounded rationality. From this vantage point, the behaviors of poor youth are not determined by individual economic interests or by pure emotion, but by aspirations. This paper proposes that these youth struggle and create strategies to improve their lives that are conditioned by experience and observation of those who inform their social worlds.
This paper shows that the GCC cities’ remarkable capacity to provide water to all their inhabitants despite the regional aridity should not be explained solely by apolitical factors such as the availability of desalination technologies and massive energy resources. Although acknowledging their importance, this paper demonstrates that the historical evolutions and achievements of the water sectors in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait city over the twentieth century are first and foremost the product of local and regional politics, and of reformist leaders’ agency at various times. Major changes in water governance can also be seen as a tool for, and as a signifier of, broader state reforms and changing politics. After independence, the manufacturing, subsidizing, and massive allocation of desalinated water were part of a political strategy aimed at redistributing oil rent to facilitate the tribes’ allegiance to the regimes, and to legitimize the increasing power of the new states. By contrast, the region’s recent trend of water privatizations, as in Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Riyadh, for instance, represents a strategy of gradually streamlining the rentier states and liberalizing their economies with a post-rentier perspective.
This paper analyzes Qatar’s present and future challenges relating to natural resources and environmental sustainability through the concept of “natural sustainability,” which is defined as the use of natural resources in a way that ensures prosperity for humans and the environment, presently and in the future. By doing so, it proposes an alternative standpoint on sustainable development. The paper asks three broad questions: How is the relationship between development, economy, and the environment understood by different actors in Qatar? What implications do these different views have for planning and definition of desired outcomes in the areas of natural resource use and environmental sustainability? What can a more environment-centered focus contribute toward solving the existing unsustainabilities of development in Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)? By refocusing attention from the economy and growth to the environment and its limits; and from technology and efficiency to institutions, people, and resourcefulness, Qatar and the GCC states might be able to avoid an impending collapse stemming from their fast exacerbating natural unsustainability.
In this first attempt to review all six GCC nations, this paper takes an exploratory-cum-constructivist approach and argues that closer cooperation and unified policy structures on nationalization are needed across all GCC countries. Education, training, the transfer of knowledge from expatriate to citizen, better approaches to encouraging citizens into the private sector, and the greater inclusion of women are all significant issues that need to be tackled in order to fulfill the desired goal of nationalizing the labor force across all GCC states. A clear and unified policy in terms of structural reform across GCC countries needs to be collectively defined, although methods of implementation would need to be more tailored and distinctive from one country to another.
Rentier state theory (RST), which seeks to explain the impacts of external payments—or rents—on state-society relations and governance, has been in wide usage for over two decades, and is still routinely cited by scholars writing on the Gulf or other parts of the world. Its tenets are widely—if by no means unanimously— accepted, and retain a strong validity at the broader level. However, RST has not adapted enough to explain the dramatic changes in the political economies of the Gulf in the past two decades or so, including the responses of Dubai, Bahrain, and more recently Qatar and Abu Dhabi, to globalization, new technologies, freer trade and investments, social changes, and development imperatives. It is argued here that a new phase of RST—“late rentierism”—should be applied to the wealthy Arab Gulf states. The case for late rentierism is made with an emphasis on the shortcomings or oversimplifications of other rentier approaches. This study also describes and explains late rentierism through a discussion and elucidation of its major features and characteristics, including how these vary, or not, from those of other rentier explanations.
This contribution surveys the historical development and current state of e-learning in Qatar and the GCC states, including the educational, political, social, and financial factors that led to the adoption and development of current systems and initiatives. Although significant challenges have arisen in the use of e-learning technologies, such as general computer literacy, interoperability and cross-platform issues associated with the flood of learning objects on the market, the lack of Arabic language learning objects, and Internet bandwidth and reliability, e-learning is poised to usher in considerable educational changes in the learning populations of the Gulf region. In the face of declining hydrocarbon reserves in some Gulf nations, this paper analyzes the ways in which e-learning initiatives have been designed to help create the post-oil knowledge economies, which Gulf rulers hope will propel GCC countries into the top tier of technologically advanced societies in the world.
Bullets and Bulletins offers original insights into the role of traditional and new media in what is undoubtedly a critical period in contemporary Middle Eastern history. It takes a sobering look at the intersections between media and politics before, during, and after the Arab uprisings. Drawing on in-depth case studies from throughout the Middle East and North Africa region, the book explores how the uprisings were accompanied by profound changes in the roles of traditional and new media, and how these changing dynamics played out during the region's uneasy transition.
Explaining the different ways in which globalising forces have shaped new dimensions to the political economy of the Persian Gulf states, this book evaluates the changes that have occurred, especially in light of the ongoing global economic crisis. Mutually beneficial rentier arrangements have guided the GCC countries formation of oil-based economies and labor relations in the past, but will this necessarily be the case in the future? This book addresses key issues including discussion on the future demographic aspects of the GCC; the feasibility of establishing a GCC monetary union; the effects of rentierism on state autonomy; and analysis of sovereign wealth funds and Islamic banking models.