The Sixth Conference of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) held in Beirut, Lebanon, 25 to 28 May 2023

Early career researchers from the Mapping Connections project presented their work at a panel convened as part of the Sixth Conference of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) held in Beirut, Lebanon, 25 to 28 May 2023. ACSS is a partner of the Mapping Connections project, and their biannual conference brought together close to 400 researchers from the Arab region and the world, as well as the ACSS Board of Trustees, representatives of donor organizations, university presidents, deans, and faculty members in prominent universities around the region.  

The panel speakers and abstracts were as follows: 

Mapping Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East

Panel Chair: Dr. Kanwal Tareq Abdulhameed (Post-doctoral researcher, University of Exeter) 

1.     Title: Two wheels and two wings: Assembling Chinese industrial park-port projects in the ME

Presenter: Safa Joudeh (SOAS University of London)

Recent research has explored the features of an emergent international development regime that embraces infrastructure-led development as a means of enhancing connectivity and global market integration.   While numerous influential international institutions have been at the forefront of the global infrastructure drive, emerging economic actors such as China are becoming increasingly active as providers of infrastructure development assistance.  This paper hopes to examine the role of connectivity driven infrastructure in China’s rise as a global superpower and leading economic actor in the Middle East, and implication of global infrastructure deployment for host countries.  It will focus on China’s industrial park-port model, which in recent years has emerged as a cornerstone of China’s global infrastructure megaproject the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a and key elements of Sino-Middle East cooperation under the BRI.

2.     Title: “We are outside of the statistics”: Why a study of China-Palestine Trade cannot be one of ‘numbers’

Presenter: Dr. Oliver John Hayakawa (Beijing Foreign Studies University)

This paper provides an alternative perspective of China-Middle East economic relations by challenging the validity of official trade data through a ‘bottom up’ ethnographic study of globalised commerce. The paper highlights that an attempt to explore such bilateral trade from the ‘top down’ provides neither an accurate indication of the value of this transnational trade nor a useful framework to engage with the varied social, economic, and political dynamics of this globalised commerce and their broader implications on China-Middle East relations - insights that can scarcely be appreciated through statistics. This involves a shift in attention towards key –yet lesser known- nodes of economic activity that have adopted strategic and influential roles in global commerce, but particularly a look to a lesser considered group of transnational traders that skirt the line of legal/illegal and licit/illicit in their daily practices and how they mediate the multifaceted nature of trade between China and the Middle East. The paper will specifically look at the case of China-Palestine trade and use a ‘journey’ of goods from the Chinese market city of Yiwu, through the ports in Israel, to the Palestinian marketplace in the West Bank, to unpack the web of practices that contribute towards the under declaration of traded goods.

3.     Title: “Halal Food Certification and Quality Standardization: Expanding the Global Halal Economy and International Partnerships”

Presenter: Dr. Zaynab El Bernoussi (NYU Abu Dhabi)

Abstract: This research on the global halal economy focuses on Morocco, Spain and Indonesia as three significant halal markets in size but also in aspiration of leading halal certification and related quality standardization in the past few years. For each case, I systematically look at whether China is a significant partner in the halal market and projections regarding their influence. The expansion of the halal certification process in these countries also presents a trend that is now increasingly observable in the respective regions of the three countries of interest here (i.e, MENA, EU and ASEAN). This paper first presents a general and select review of literature in social studies of halal markets and international relations of the global South relevant to the topic of the research, notably with the growing influence of China. Then, the methods section provides an overview of the actors interviewed to learn about halal certification and quality standardization, and the questions that framed the discussions and exchange with them. Lastly, the findings and analysis section concentrates on three key arguments: 1) the halal protocols suffer from a double illness: firms find them burdensome and halal certification bodies (HCBs) from different countries tend to distrust each other; 2) despite being the symbolic center of the Muslim world, MENA countries seem to lag behind in terms of heralding global efforts to unify the global halal economy; 3) even if the global halal market lacks unity in terms of its framing, its growth is triggering important advancements in terms of standardization and quality control that institutionalize consumption and production ethics and professionalize the halal market.

4.     Title: Before and Beyond the Confucius Institute: A Case Study of the Institutional Landscape in the MENA for Silk Road Mandarin Learning

Presenter: Jie Wang (University of Cambridge)

The Western international relations concept “soft power” has deeply penetrated official, academic, and public vocabulary of China’s presence in the MENA region in this century. It has also been an analytical framework featuring centrally in scholarly discussion of China’s expanding cultural influence in the latter. Previous literature has highlighted the lavish attention to the Confucius Institute in its capacity as being the institutional extension of the Chinese state’s soft power in cultural domain. In this paper, I argue that conditions of globalisation, the Chinese government’s provision of scholarships, legacies of the socialist era of China, and internationalisation of Chinese universities, together, produce a sui generis market beyond universities (in China and the Arab world) of Mandarin teaching and learning, one which contains multiple constituent collectivities of different cohorts of actors and institutional/organisational forms. In this market, the Confucius Institute is not the centre, nor the only Chinese entity. It is so far the most established, well-known, and visible (Chinese) actor. As to the non-Chinese actors (locally and internationally), their devotion to providing Mandarin courses, both in person and through social media, point to their understanding of cultural diversity, the economic value of Mandarin in international trading, and one of the means to making a living. Primary sources were collected through anthropological fieldwork, and digital ethnography.