MENASIA: Geopolitics, Energy, and Security Workshop, Stockholm, Sweden | 4-5 December

SIPRI WORKSHOP

Background

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region shares deep historical connections with many Asian countries that go back hundreds of years. These relations have evolved under similar patterns, including through tools of soft and hard power, trade, and diplomacy, that continue to shape our world today. However, an increasingly complicated geopolitical picture, combined with deeper economic interdependence over the past several decades, has reshaped the relationship between MENA and Asian countries, particularly between Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states and China, India, Japan, and South Korea. This has attracted the attention of many scholars and institutions to investigate these growing, dynamic, and multifaceted relationships on bilateral, regional, and international levels.

Energy security has been among the most important areas that has shaped the research agenda with regards to MENA and Asia, catalyzed by entrenched oil dependencies between Gulf state suppliers and East Asian consumers, of which China is by far the largest (by volume). With the energy transition well underway, several questions abound surrounding the future of these relationships and their projected transformation.

Expanding trade relations between the MENA and Asia are reflected by various ongoing Free Trade Agreement negotiations between both regions. Currently, China, Japan, and South Korea are each in the process of negotiating FTAs with the GCC, which will likely increase the depth of economic, and by extension political, partnerships across these regions. Furthermore, the GCC, and the MENA region at large, is an integral part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with billions of dollars in investments and ongoing construction projects. India, on the other hand, maintains a sizable number of high and low-skilled migrant workers in the GCC, which offers both challenges and opportunities.

While it doesn’t currently have an FTA with the GCC states, in 2022, India signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with the UAE, and recently at the G20 summit in New Delhi, announced the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), cementing aspirations to further expand its economic ties with the MENA.

On the foreign policy front, the MENA and Asia have traditionally maintained a strategic distance. However, China’s ambitions to shape international and regional conflict dynamics, exemplified most visibly in its brokering of an Iran-Saudi Arabia peace deal and its growing partnerships in the arms and defense sectors with MENA states, have pushed MENA states towards closer security cooperation with the Asian powers. Geopolitical turbulence and intensifying great power competition have also heightened the weight and significance of middle powers, across both the MENA and Asia, and their alignments.

In a recent publication, the ME Council explored the complex dynamics of deepening engagement between the GCC and the four Asian powers—China, India, South Korea, and Japan. This workshop expands on that work, topically diving into three important areas: geopolitics, energy security, and defense, where better understanding of evolving MENA-Asia relationships remains necessary.

Workshop

With a continued and expanding interest in exploring the multilayered connections between the MENA and Asian countries, SIPRI and the ME Council intend to organize a 1.5-day workshop with experts on the MENA and Asia focusing on three broad themes of interest: a) Geopolitics, Economics, and 2 Regional Dynamics; b) Hydrocarbons, Energy Transitions and Environmental Risks; and c) Defense and Technology.

These themes and topics, which are becoming critical in an ever challenging and intricate geopolitical world where political economy, energy, and war are no longer confined to local or regional contexts, will serve as anchors to guide discussions and outputs. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the War on Gaza, and the escalating competition between the United States (a traditional GCC ally with an entrenched MENA presence) and China (the GCC, and most MENA countries’, largest trading partner) are examples of cases with numerous knock-on effects on socioeconomics, security, and the environment, as well as trade and investment. The workshop will serve as an opportunity to openly exchange and share research ideas among invited experts. It will offer a space for networking, exploring research collaborations, funding proposals, and creative and diverse outputs.