Browsing by Author "Alqahtani, Mesfer"

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How do Middle Eastern countries engage with Chinese economic diplomacy? A comparative analysis of Egypt and Saudi Arabia
(Saudi Digital Library, 2024) Alqahtani, Mesfer; Bishop, Matthew L; Hobson, John M
How do Middle Eastern countries engage with Chinese economic diplomacy? This apparently simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet it is one that requires a response, because, over the past two or three decades – and particularly since the Arab Spring of 2010/11, when many regional states lost confidence in the support of Western partners – the relationship between Beijing and the Middle East has intensified to the extent that, in certain respects, it has transcended a straightforward set of trade or commercial linkages to encompass something much deeper and more strategic, grounded in shared preferences that may even be reshaping the region’s political economy. Indeed, some countries have even come to rely on Chinese investment and markets to such a degree that they are fully embedding their own development strategies within the emerging framework of its Belt and Road Initiative. However, despite these transformations, and certainly compared to other developing regions like Africa and Latin America, there is precious little scholarly research on the subject. In part, this reflects difficulties of access, but it is also because the region’s own distinctive profile – it comprises a range of non-democratic Arab and non-Arab countries, many of them also rentier states, and is relatively proximate to China – renders it quite different in key respects. This thesis seeks to redress the balance and contributes to filling this gap. It reviews the existing literature on China’s engagement in Africa and Latin America, and from this it distils three positions that might be applied to comprehending perceptions of the Middle Eastern equivalent: Sino-optimist, Sino-pessimist, and Sino-pragmatist. It then deploys a constructivist theoretical framework to examine contemporary Chinese economic diplomacy in two quite different Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia: the former a larger but poorer and more diverse economy requiring infrastructural upgrading, the latter a smaller but wealthier rentier economy requiring economic diversification. It situates this analysis within their evolving contemporary relationship with the People’s Republic of China. At the end of the thesis, the study reflects on the extent to which a prevailing Sino-pragmatist account of these processes appears the most appropriate way to understand them, before outlining three broad contributions to knowledge: partly filling the empirical gap regarding Chinese economic diplomacy in the Middle East; adding to existing debates on Chinese engagement in the non-West through the distillation of the optimist-pessimist-pragmatist framing; and offering a recipient-centric view of Chinese diplomacy.
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Non-State Actors as Cyber Operation Participants: Extending the Law of State Responsibility to Non-State Actors Engaged in Cyber Operations and Attacks
(Saudi Digital Library, 2023-11-30) Alqahtani, Mesfer; Elliot, Winter
The role of Non-State Actors in both International Law and International Humanitarian law, has presented an issue for legal scholars for some time, and as yet it is without a definitive answer. In the context of cyber operations, both at apparent times of peace and in times of international armed conflict, this adds a further layer of complexity to the attribution of State Responsibility for such attacks. Thus, within this study these issues are examined through looking at the international law of State Responsibility and attribution, with a focus on the changing customary norms and soft law instruments that could be adapted to assist States in accepting the positive obligation of customary International Law to take action to prevent and disrupt such attacks, as the “carrot” approach, and the assignment of responsibility to states for the actions of non-state actors (NSAs) through the doctrines of effective and overall control as the opposing “stick”. Furthermore, it looks at how a States lack of action can be considered “complicity” in order to frame up how the “soft law” instruments of the Draft Articles of State Responsibility and the Tallinn Manual on the International Law of Cyber Operations can combine to create a persuasive political and diplomatic international obligation upon States, which would serve to prevent, mitigate and disrupt State use of Non-State Cyber Actors as proxies in their covert cyber operations.
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