Qatar

Short of the war, the destruction, and the massive loss of life, Ukraine is in many ways similar to the Gulf crisis in which the UAE, together with Saudi Arabia, led a 3.5-year-long economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar that, like the Russian invasion, was designed to hollow out the sovereignty of a neighbouring state.

Soft power and nation branding are essential factors for a state to communicate with global audiences around the world. A state's investments in public diplomacy, and nation branding campaigns can prove to be effective in terms of establishing relationships with other countries, promoting tourism, and to gain influence in the international community. Qatar has established various soft power resources such as the Al Jazeera news network, FIFA World Cup 2022, and several cultural and educational exchange programs with countries from around the world. This dissertation will conclude that soft power has proved to be an effective strategy to be implemented by the state of Qatar, the small state has established itself in the international community by gaining legitimacy and credibility in the international community, which gives the small state the ability to gain regional influence. Through these soft power strategies the small state can go forward to pursue its ambitious foreign policy objectives.

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Contributions by

KONSTANTINOS CHATZIANTONIOU
JOACHIM GIERLICHS
FRANAK HILLOOWALA
KATHRYN KALEMKERIAN
SABA AL KUWARI
LISA MALCOM
JULES MCDEVITT
SHEIKHA AL NASSER
SUSAN REES
MICHELLE WALTON

Die Nationalmannschaft Katars hat zum ersten Mail die Asienmeisterschaft gewonnen. Zuvor hat sie bei neun Teilnahmen an dem Turnier insgesamt nur sechs Spiele gewonnen. Hinter dem Aufstieg steht unter anderem eine intensive Nachwuchsförderung. Bei der WM 2022 im eigenen Land wollen die jungen Spieler ihren Zenit erreichen.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as a process has enthused a range
of positive international debate following its becoming the one paradigm being
globally promoted by institutions and water professionals to answer to the multi-
dimensional, multi-sectoral and multi-regional water issues. Despite it becoming a
commonplace concept in many countries that seek to address critical water resource
management issues and water shortages, the extent to which it is being adopted in
the affluent State of Qatar remains unknown with little evidence to indicate that
progress has been achieved in embracing an IWRM plan that is attuned to Qatar’s
needs.
This study explored the perception of IWRM and the factors impeding the adoption of
Integrated Water Resource Management as a process for managing the water
resources and addressing the critical water-shortage problems in Qatar. A
comprehensive qualitative literature review was carried out to seek out critical
information about the subject of IWRM. Several challenges and barriers were
identified from literature and used in exploratory interviews with industry experts in
Qatar to investigate the relevance of each. A survey questionnaire was prepared and
commissioned with water experts and practitioners from various backgrounds
ranging from government representatives, property developers, consultants and
contractors who are all involved in water development and management.
The interviews were prudent to help identify the level of awareness and the top three
factors hindering the adoption and application of IWRM in Qatar. The results revealed
that participants were mostly familiar with the concept of IWRM however only 40%
said they were well-versed. The results also indicated that human capacity building
(80%) is the number one reason preventing a full-fledge development of IWRM
followed by the fragmental and piecemeal approach towards managing water
resources (60%) and lastly, the ineffective management of water-related data and
information (50%). The clear majority felt that the current legal framework in place
comprised of policies and legislation that promote that concept of IWRM. The study
also showed an urgent need in Qatar for education and promotion of IWRM concepts
and principles at the level of water practitioners as well as the civil society and general
public.
In conclusion recommendations on improvements, emphasis and strategic direction
to attain IWRM plan in Qatar were drawn out and discussed.

'So far, not a shot has been fired. In bleak, besieged Buraimi, Turki still holds out; he has 800 bags of rice, enough for many meals. Around him circles a busy band of British. Happiest of all are the local sheikhs. They figure that all this excitement means oil. One of them has already decided how to spend his first oil royalty check – on a fancy new airplane.' To most outsiders in the 1950s, the Buraimi Affair was a passing curiosity, a faraway squabble about territorial rights in a remote corner of southeast
Arabia known as the Buraimi Oasis. The British government
backed its protégés, Abu Dhabi and Oman, against Saudi Arabia, while the United States government took a mediating role. However, as the Time magazine report suggested, there was another aspect to the dispute: it was rumoured that Buraimi was “floating on a pool of oil.”

The aim of this policy brief is to provide some understanding of the health constraints faced by single male laborers (SMLs), the policy efforts underway to enhance their access to healthcare, and further actions that ought to be undertaken to strengthen and improve healthcare for this group of migrant workers in Qatar.

Food insecurity concerns are as old as humanity. Food security exists when all population, at all times, has access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food. It is built on four pillars, namely food availability, food access, food utilisation, and stability. While it is widely admitted that food security increases with economic development, also rich countries in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region, such as Qatar, face specific challenges. Therefore, this review paper analyses the state, determinants and perspectives of food security in Qatar. Since 2007-2008 global food crisis, Qatar’s food security has been an ongoing challenge as the growing population is making significant pressure on the government. Based on its fiscal strength, the Qatari government adopted three important strategies: increasing local production, foreign agro-investments and long-term arrangements for food imports. As a result, in 2018, Qatar was ranked first in the Arab world and 22nd globally in the Global Food Security Index. However, denied food supplies from Saudi Arabia following the blockade in June 2017 exposed the high dependence of Qatar on imports, limits of import-based food policies and the need to increase the local production. Since then the Qatari agriculture sector has been under growing pressure to increase the local food production and to realize the highest possible level of self-sufficiency. However, agriculture is limited by several natural conditions, such as scarce water resources and poor soils, and aquifers have been heavily exploited above the average natural recharge. In addition, local food production is limited by some structural factors such as low use of modern agricultural techniques and equipment, and the poor sectoral coordination and integration within the governmental institutions. The paper makes the case for promoting a productive and sustainable agriculture, with high resources use efficiency, to increase food security in Qatar.

Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World, edited by Philip Seib, is an important book that provides a fresh analytical perspective grounded in a solid overview of the rising news channel. As Al Jazeera expands its audience in the United States, and as it plans to launch new channels in several languages, the book fills a gap in academic literature about the global news network. Thus, it is likely to appeal to a diverse scholarly and media practitioner readership. The volume includes nine chapters that analyze varied facets of Al Jazeera English (AJE) audience and coverage in the United States, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

By getting involved in the “Arab Spring”, Qatar was determined to continue waging its foreign policy aimed at strengthening the positions of the country combined with the intention to create corresponding markets outside the country for Qatari gas. The
Russia-Iran-US agreement on the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, along with the newly-emerging Iran-US approchement, urged Qatar to re-think its Syrian agenda, especially in light of the diplomatic blockade by the Gulf states. It is concluded in the article that after the Syrian crisis, Qatar will continue seeking gas markets in order to ensure its national
interests.

Presented at the International Conference on Gender and "The Law": Limits, Contestations and Beyond.

Organizers: London Centre for Social Studies (LCSS), in partnership with Dokuz Eylul University, Gediz University, and Indiana University.
Dates: 4-6 June 2014
Venue: Dokuz Eylul University and Gediz University, Izmir, Turkey
URL: http://www.socialstudies.org.uk/Events/Conferences/6278/International-Conference-on-Gender-and-The-Law-Lim

Preliminary results from further survey and a series of test pit excavations at the flint scatter site of Ras Ushayriq (QHNER 141) during the 2010 season has led to a re-assessment of the nature and chronology of the site.  Over 1500 lithics were collected including implements of the Arabian Bifacial Tradition (ABT) in the form of barbed and tanged arrowheads, a ‘knife’, and possible bifacial performs.  The site has also yielded an axe which exhibits evidence of hafting and a particularly high number of scraper tools.  A hearth has also been uncovered containing lithics, pottery, and fragments of animal and fish bone.  Furthermore, over fifty pieces of Ubaid pottery were discovered, and most significantly five worked fragments of obsidian.

The diversity of technologies combined with the wide variety of different raw material types present suggests successive re-occupation of the site using both local and imported materials.  Evidence of interaction between Arabia and Mesopotamia in the form of Ubaid pottery suggests a date of between 6000-3500BC, placing the main occupation of the site within the Neolithic and the early Holocene.  The recovery of five worked obsidian pieces represents the largest assemblage of obsidian discovered in Qatar to date and implies that the trade in this commodity is perhaps more significant than previously surmised.

This article analyses the current Gulf crisis that started in May 2017 by posing the following question. Did an information war unfold or did the crisis events that took place merely illustrate yet another round of propaganda and disinformation contests among Gulf participants and their backers? Accordingly, I will focus on five central themes. First, the theoretical underpinning and key concepts concerning Information Warfare (and related notions like Hacktivism and Cyber War) will be discussed in relation to information space and the media sphere. The second theme explores the historical, strategic, and geopolitical dynamics that led to the crisis and looks closely at the rivalries taking place in the region, with a particular focus on the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions and cyber threats, the third theme reviews some of the most notorious cyber attacks that occurred in the Gulf region up until the Trump Presidency. The fourth t...

Katar son yıllarda Ortadoğu'da gerek tek başına gerekse uluslararası örgütler vasıtasıyla yoğun bir dış politik etkinlik içerisindedir. Körfezin bu küçük ama etkin ülkesi adından son dönemlerin popüler politik söylemi olan yumuşak güçle anılmaktadır. Gerçektende kavramı çalışacak olan bir siyaset bilimci için Katar'ın faaliyetleri define hükmündedir. Katar'ın Lübnan'daki çözümde ki etkinliği, Filistin meselesinde ve Arap baharında ki gösterdiği duruşu bunun yanında gerek ABD ve Çin gibi dünya devletleriyle ilişkileri; gerekse Türkiye ve İran gibi bölge ülkeleriyle kurduğu ilişkileri, Katar'ın etkin çalışan bir dış politikaya sahip olduğunu göstermektedir. GİRİŞ Dünya, ikinci dünya savası sonrası dönemde birleşik devletler ve Sovyetler Birliği arasında iki kutuplu bir yapı ile yönetilmiştir. Sonraki süreçte 1990'lı yıllarda tek kutuplu bir yapıya evirilmiştir ve tek hegamonik güç olarak Amerika Birleşik Devletler(ABD) kalmıştır. Bundan sonra 2000'li yıllarda itibaren dünya daha çok çok kutuplu bir profil göstermiştir. Bu çok kutuplu yapıya izin veren en önemli mesele askeri ve güvenlik konularına olan, ilginin ekonomik, sosyal ve kültürel meselelere kaymış olmasıdır. Bu kapsamda üzerinde durulması gereken bir kavramda yumuşak güçtür. Özellikle bu yeni dönemde askeri yönde zayıf anacak başka özellikleri bakımından güçlü ülkelere yeni türden bir ilişki süreci başlamıştır. Bu yöntemi kullanan başta ikinci dünya savaşı sonrası askeri yönden dağılmış olan Avrupa ülkeleri olmuştur. Bununla beraber Japonya gibi Uzakdoğu ülkelerinde yöntem olarak bu strateji kullanılmıştır. Bu ülkeler kurdukları diplomatik ilişkilerde muhataplarını daha çok ticari, kültür, sanat ve bilim gibi organizasyonlar ile ikna etme gayreti içerisine girişmişlerdir.

This article explores how the professional identities of ten experienced English language teachers were affected as their pedagogies adapted to operating in a major government institution of higher education in Qatar. Exploratory research was employed. A logical chain of evidence was established in order to analyze qualitative data which was generated by open-ended questionnaires. The results indicate that institutionally imposed pedagogical adaptation may result in a renegotiation of professional identity for some teachers. Additionally, teachers experience identity renegotiation in very personal ways.

This paper deals with place branding as a multimodally constructed phenomenon in the digital semioscape of advertisements pertaining to the collaboration between Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona. Through its digital spatialisation, Qatar, and, by extension, Qatari leadership of the country, is argued to construct for and brand itself as an image of eutopia (i.e. a nice place to live) drawing on two techniques, inter-peopleisation and reterritorialisation. In this way, Qatar aims at engaging in controversially conveyed soft politics, whereby it can strategically secure its national sustainability by achieving recognizability, admiration and respect both inside and outside its borders. Qatar Airways' semioscape is also argued to be a visceral semioscape, whose analysis creates academic fetish, namely added value for Qatar in academic scholarship from a person who has been living and working in the country for nine years. It is important to have such emic reflections, in order to do justice to a country that is usually portrayed in very negative and distorted terms in world media, by people who do not have deep knowledge of the country and its people.

Oil has seriously impacted the institutional development of the state in the Arabian Peninsula. More specifically, the sudden and unprecedented acquisition of massive oil revenues resulted in the freezing of the state’s formal and informal institutions, at the point at which petrodollars were injected into the state’s coffers. From then on, state leaders were able to
deploy the state’s wealth to dictate the pace and direction of institutional change. Over time, any institutional change has been directed towards enhancing regime security, and the pace of change has been calculated and deliberately slow. Any political opening has been dictated by the logic of state power maximization (in relation to society). At the same time, partly to ensure its popular legitimacy and partly through the vision of its leaders, the state has deployed its massive wealth both to foster rapid economic and infrastructural development, and to enhance the living standards of its citizens. In other words, whereas oil may have stunted institutional development –– i.e., an institution’s curse –– it has been an economic blessing.

This work is written by Matthew Gray.
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 study examines the impact of an evidence-based coaching intervention in a Qatari government preparatory (middle) school. The study sample consisted of 40 male students aged between 13 and 16 years (mean age 14.2). The sample was randomly selected and divided into two groups, namely the coaching group and the control group, to conduct a randomized controlled trial. The coaching program was part of a coaching club established for the purposes of this study. The coaching group took part in a 24-session evidence-based coaching program (teacher-facilitated) that included topics such as goal setting, leadership skills, coaching, and personality types. Pre-and post-measures were obtained for both groups. The measures consisted of the Big-Five personality traits survey and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. In addition to the quantitative measures, interviews were conducted with eight randomly selected students from the coaching group to increase the qualitative dimension of the results.

This first micro-level study of temporary migrants from developing countries in Qatar uses data collected during the summer of 2007. The median migrant has the following profile: male, thirty-one years of age, single and possessing a high school education. He works ten hours a day, six days per week, and earns US$3,945 per annum of which over half is remitted home to his parents. He incurred a job placement fee equivalent to 1.25 times his monthly salary. Using multivariate regression, we find that migrants' capacity for work is positively correlated with age, having a university degree, and satisfaction with sleep and mental wellbeing. Estimates of a remittance function show that males send more money home, and that migrants are motivated to save, therefore a tendency to transfer higher amounts. We also find that older migrants remit more, suggesting that as the likelihood of returning home increases with age, remittance level rises.

Throughout the late Pleistocene and early Holocene the landscape of Qatar was transformed by global climate changes, cycles of sea level rise and fluctuations in rainfall. The Peninsula is formed from Eocene limestone which was subsequently shaped by geomorphological processes, leaving a gently undulating landscape featuring rock outcrops and sediment bowls. As a result of late Pleistocene and early Holocene sea level rise, the Arabian Gulf now surrounds the western, northern and eastern sides of the landmass, but for most of prehistory Qatar was part of a landlocked, hyper-arid region. Given these changes it is therefore important to consider both the changing external conditions that influenced human behaviour in prehistory and the varying taphonomic pathways that were favourable for site preservation. These are fundamental tenets of landscape archaeology, placing past human activities within the wider context of a landscape that is the product of climatic fluctuation and geomorphological change.

This Migrant Labor in the Gulf Summary Report details the research findings that were presented by the Migrant Labor in the Gulf working group participants during their meetings in Doha, Qatar. CIRS launched the initiative in 2008 and held a total of three meetings. The working group is composed of experts in the field of migrant labor who hail from a variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. The working group is also composed of the CIRS research grant recipients: Andrew Gardner from the University of Puget Sound, Arland Thornton, Mansoor Moaddel, Dirgha Ghimirie, Linda Young-DeMarco, and Nathalie Williams from the University of Michigan, Susan Martin from Georgetown University, Mary Breeding from the World Bank, and David Mednicoff from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The edited volume, titled Migrant Labour in the Persian Gulf was published by Columbia University Press/Hurst in 2012.