The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ) at Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) will unpack global power competition and its implications on the Global South at its 2023 conference, “The Global South in an Era of Great Power Competition”, on November 18-19, in collaboration with the Security in Context (SiC) network.
Funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of the Arab Information and Media Studies (AIMS) project, with additional support from the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) and Georgetown University in Qatar, the conference will examine the contours of the emerging world order in relationship to the politics of security and insecurity, militarism, and geopolitics.
Scholars from Qatar and around the world will look at the ways great power competition produces insecurity in the Global South, the interplay between the agendas of big powers and the agency of Global South countries, and many other themes related to the security and insecurity of the Global South amid a changing world order and governance.
The conference is organised by Northwestern Qatar professor Sami Hermez, who serves as co-ordinator of the Qatar hub of the ACSS Critical Security Studies network, Security in Context Project director Omar Dahi, and Firat Demir, a professor from the University of Oklahoma.
“By leveraging the collective expertise of Qatar-based scholars and the SIC network, this conference will enable us to explore the evolving dynamics of great power competition within the Global South while advancing original research on one of the biggest issues in the world,” said Hermez, associate professor and director of the Liberal Arts Programme at the NU-Q.
In underscoring the importance of the conference, NU-Q dean and chief executive and #IAS_NUQ founder Marwan M Kraidy said: “In a rapidly evolving world, the Global South stands at the crossroads of great power competition.”
“From the unsettling shadows of militarism to the intricate web of geopolitics, this conference will seek to understand the roots of insecurity in the Global South while trying to answer some of the critical questions that define our global landscape,” he said.
The conference is part of the AIMS project at #IAS_NUQ, which seeks to expand the field of critical media and information studies in the Arab region and transform it into an interdisciplinary, multilingual, collaborative, research-oriented, and policy-relevant field.
The SiC is a transnational organisation of scholars and policy researchers committed to building knowledge about the root causes of insecurity.
They aim to educate the public and policymakers about solutions that account for conditions of structural violence.
