Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are amplifying their focus on international education hubs to boost their regional leadership and project soft power in the MENA region. Sensing a propitious geopolitical climate, the two countries aim to enhance their regional influence through education. However, the capacity of education hubs to support the quest for regional leadership can be diminished by entrenchment in conventional organizational design and exposure to sustainability risks.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—are undergoing transformative change. Inseparable from this change is how these countries envision the role of internationalization in higher education. Nowhere is this role more evident than in the rhetoric regarding international education hubs in Qatar and the UAE. Drawing on policy documents and other forms of textual data from these two countries, our recent study finds a shift of focus from associating education hubs with capacity-building to increasingly associating these institutions with efforts to elevate the two countries’ regional impact and ability to project soft power in overlapping geopolitical spheres of influence. Below, we briefly examine this shift of orientation, which could broaden our understanding of the nature of change it is orchestrating, the forces shaping the change, and the dynamic nature of cross-border education.

The Contours of Change

Our analysis detected four themes associated with education hubs: 1) the knowledge economy, 2) national development, 3) market for education, and 4) regional leadership. The first three concur with previous studies which made significant headway in discussions of education hubs in Qatar and the UAE. Thus, discussions abound around these projects and their collective identity as a cultural counterweight to modern institutions of equal prestige as the dominant Western international higher education. With a combination of strategic calculus and broad publicity, education hubs were leveraged to create a market for education. Getting a central place in the respective national higher education systems, they functioned as a mechanism for reducing the costs of international placements. This is not to ignore their primary policy objective of incubating intellectual capital, knowledge, and innovation that can potentially support a two-pronged goal: transitioning from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, and promoting sustainable development.

Nonetheless, the fourth theme—regional leadership—is new insofar as the increasing attention this topic has received in recent years. It is perhaps a timely theme, given the emphasis placed on becoming the regional knowledge hub in the two countries’ long-term development strategies (i.e., Qatar National Vision 2030, Dubai Economic Agenda D33). It is noteworthy that across the GCC, most capital expenditure is forecast to occur in the fulfillment of similar development plans (i.e., Saudi Vision 2030, Kuwait Vision 2035). All of these plans enshrine the objective of economic diversification, in which higher education is expected to play a vital role in promoting socioeconomic cohesion. However, none of them prioritize regional leadership through education as those of Qatar and the UAE. Our assessment is that the drive to pursue this goal is mediated by a propitious moment in geopolitical affairs, which encourages the two countries to amplify their focus on becoming central to the region’s knowledge production and capitalization.

The Regional Landscape

A key variable for understanding how the two countries view education hubs (and higher education more broadly) is the shift of strategic priorities in the GCC toward the centrality of sustainable development. Cognizant that the prosperity generated by petrodollars may be unsustainable within a global shift to knowledge economy, governments are currently on a full economic diversification drive, underscoring the important role higher education needs to play to achieve that development goal.

Geopolitics Fueling the Leadership Drive

Education hubs and internationalization emerge as vectors of competition between the two case countries during times of heightened geopolitical uncertainties and a modest economic outlook in the wider MENA region. This raises a question about the prospects of success for a project of such magnitude as becoming “the regional knowledge hub.”

Despite several flashpoints in the MENA region which could disrupt academic institutions, the six GCC states remain the most stable jurisdictions. In regional comparisons by the World Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the GCC states continue to show encouraging signs, accounting for the highest growth rates in the region. This means, first, that investment will continue to flow into nonenergy sectors such as education, linked to these countries’ diversification drive. Second, the demand for higher education in the GCC is likely to rise due to population growth and to the growth in the number of students from regional neighbors experiencing political unrest. The latter has been the case recently with many students from Sudan and Ukraine seeking access to education in Qatar and the UAE, which have radically altered their regulatory infrastructure to help higher education institutions accommodate projected demand.

Another geopolitical development is that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE (and other GCC states to a lesser extent) have sought to capitalize on growing geostrategic competition between China and India, positioning themselves as central to these countries’ logistics plans. Thus, while forging close ties with China by becoming key maritime nodes on the country’s Belt and Road Initiative, they have signed the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a United States-led connectivity project to link the European Union and India via the GCC region. If not disrupted, the IMEC will strengthen the impetus for leadership, as it will consolidate the GCC states as the lynchpin of regional coordination arrangements. This will, in turn, expand the recruitment pool for these states to include talents from China and India, besides the MENA region.

The question is why Saudi Arabia, which has the largest higher education system, shrugs off the leadership roles pursued by Qatar and the UAE. In fact, while Saudi Arabia has the capacity to extract and mobilize resources for such a pursuit, it lags behind in terms of regulations regarding sponsorship of students and related issues such as off-campus student accommodation or part-time and postgraduate employment. Additionally, the brands of Western institutions hosted by Qatar and the UAE can be an important draw factor for prospective international students. The combined effect of these factors gives Qatar and the UAE a competitive edge in recruitment.

The Challenges Ahead

We believe that regional leadership in education is an impetus that will face two challenges. The first is organizational in nature. Specifically, most programs and degrees are entrenched in conventional disciplinary constructs, especially at undergraduate level. Thus, students interested in emerging fields of study may find it difficult to satisfy their academic goals. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, insufficient focus on interdisciplinarity can lessen the capacity to exercise leadership by mounting a response to intractable global and/or regional problems, which are mostly interdisciplinary in nature.

The second challenge is sustainability. The fact that education hubs comprise mostly foreign institutions makes this model vulnerable to the vagaries of politics. Texas A&M University’s recent decision to close its satellite campus in Qatar exemplifies this dynamic. Thus, the focus of Qatar and the UAE on regional leadership requires reflections not just on institutional design of their education hubs, but also on sustainability.

Edmund Adam is a postdoctoral student in the Faculty of Education, York University, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].

Neil Adam is PhD student in the Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].