Geoeconomics and the Gulfβs New Economic Model: Sovereign Capital, Investment Policy, and Strategic Industries
The Gulf is being reshaped by powerful and overlapping forces. Recent Middle East conflicts and rising geopolitical tensions have heightened regional instability. The global energy transition and intensifying great-power competition are adding new pressures, while ambitious national visions are redrawing the region's economic map. In this context, GCC states are mobilizing their economic resources as instruments of international influence and ...
Abstract
The Gulf is being reshaped by powerful and overlapping forces. Recent Middle East conflicts and rising geopolitical tensions have heightened regional instability. The global energy transition and intensifying great-power competition are adding new pressures, while ambitious national visions are redrawing the region's economic map. In this context, GCC states are mobilizing their economic resources as instruments of international influence and domestic transformation. Through state-led strategies to accelerate diversification and reduce hydrocarbon reliance, they are deploying energy revenues, sovereign capital, investment policy, and state-controlled enterprises.These instruments serve two purposes at once: projecting economic power abroad and reshaping the relationship between state and market. Together, they are redefining the Gulf's place in the global economy and generating new patterns of cooperation, competition, and strategic engagement across different sectors.The workshop welcomes original research on the geoeconomics of GCC economic transformation across four broad areas. The first concerns energy and geoeconomic influence, including hydrocarbon revenues, energy partnerships, and the global energy transition. The second addresses sovereign capital and financial statecraft, encompassing sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises, and international investment. The third covers trade, investment, and strategic industries, spanning foreign direct investment, industrial policy, technology transfer, and global value chains. The fourth focuses on changing GCC economic models, including diversification, productivity growth, private-sector development, employment policy, and fiscal reform.Contributions may be quantitative, qualitative, comparative, conceptual, or policy-oriented, drawing on economics, finance, international political economy, business, and public policy. Papers may focus on single countries, the region as a whole, or GCC relations
Description and Rationale
The Gulf is being reshaped by powerful and overlapping forces. Recent Middle East conflicts and escalating regional tensions have sharply elevated geopolitical risk, adding to longer-running pressures from the global energy transition, intensifying great-power competition, and ambitious national visions (Caldara and Iacoviello, 2022; Krane, 2019). In this context, the six GCC states are no longer passive recipients of global economic forces. They are mobilizing an unprecedented concentration of state-controlled resources, with over four trillion US dollars in sovereign wealth alone. This represents roughly forty percent of global SWF assets and more than half of worldwide SWF deployments in 2024 (Roll, 2026). This dual movement, in which outward economic statecraft and domestic transformation reinforce one another, sits at the heart of the emerging debate on geoeconomics (Blackwill and Harris, 2016; Clayton, Maggiori and Schreger, 2025).
Existing research has advanced our understanding of specific dimensions of this shift. Political economists have documented the historical dynamics of the Gulf rentier state and the evolving role of Gulf state-owned enterprises (Hertog, 2010a, 2010b; Kamrava, 2012; Coates Ulrichsen, 2011). Economists have examined the persistent difficulty of translating hydrocarbon revenues into productive diversification (Callen et al., 2014; Cherif, Hasanov and Zhu, 2016) and the environmental and structural pressures accompanying the energy transition (Sim, 2021; Charfeddine and Kahia, 2019). A newer literature interprets Gulf SWFs as instruments of foreign policy and financial statecraft (Braunstein, 2019; Roll, 2026), building on frameworks that examine how states leverage their positions in global economic networks (Farrell and Newman, 2019).
Yet important gaps persist. Scholarship remains fragmented across disciplines, with economists, political economists, energy analysts, and finance researchers often working in parallel rather than in dialogue. Analyses of Gulf economic statecraft tend to focus either on outward projection or on domestic reform, rarely tracing the connections between them. Comparative work on GCC economic relations with major external partners β the United States, China, the European Union, India, and Africa β remains limited despite the changing geography of Gulf trade and investment flows. Moreover, the accelerating pace of geopolitical and technological change is outstripping the empirical evidence base.
This workshop seeks to bridge these gaps through interdisciplinary dialogue on the geoeconomics of GCC economic transformation across four interrelated areas: energy and geoeconomic influence; sovereign capital and financial statecraft; trade, investment, and strategic industries; and changing GCC economic models. By convening scholars from complementary disciplines around a shared analytical frame, the workshop aims to generate publication-quality research connecting international economic engagement to domestic transformation. Contributions may be quantitative, qualitative, comparative, conceptual, or policyoriented, and may examine individual GCC countries, the GCC as a whole, or GCC relations with major external partners.
