In this enlightening analysis, Julia Gurol unpicks the complex security relations between the European Union (EU) and China. She investigates the principles, rationales and shifting dynamics of collaboration on a range of security issues, and their consequences for China, the EU and other regions. She pays particular attention to EU–China relations in the realm of anti-terrorism, anti-piracy and energy security, and disentangles their cooperation efforts in the context of increasing political and economic tensions. Systematic and accessible, this is an essential guide to the past, present and future of one of the world's most important, yet most complicated, security relationships.
From discrimination against Chinese-read migrant workers, via intraregional competition for China's favour, to collaboration on infrastructural megaprojects, vaccine development and digital surveillance techniques: Arab-Chinese relations in times of COVID-19 are complex and multi-layered. Yet, established regime-centric approachesoften fail to see this complexity by almost exclusively focusing on questions of authoritarian regime collaboration. Such approaches not only ignore the diversity of involved actors and the inherently transregional nature of contemporary authoritarian power, but also bear the risk of reproducing binary notions of authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy that fundamentally ignore the latter's coercive core. Recent work on the duality of infrastructure as both enabling global flows of goods and (re-)producing social hierarchies helps us overcome the methodological nationalism found in the majority of scholarship on authoritarian power. In this article, we provide a selective overview, through the prism of logistics and infrastructure, of Arab-Chinese authoritarian entanglements in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding authoritarian practices as territorially unboundedmodes of governance, our objective is to develop a more in-depth and context-sensitive understanding of the transregionally connected mechanisms of (re-)producing authoritarian power. We argue that the pandemic constitutes a seemingly managerial opportunity for the intensified diffusion of authoritarian practices thatbothenable certain infrastructural politics and in turn are also rendered possible by them. This emphasis on infrastructure, understood as simultaneously fostering a global circulation of goods and capital, as well as reinforcing containment and facilitating new forms of managing and repressing public discontent, provides us with a helpful lens for the development of a truly transregional understanding of authoritarian collaboration. We discuss this argument based on selected examples of digital and physical infrastructure(s) in Arab-Chinese relations,and their embedding in global flows of capital.
Scholarly debates on Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East and the international dimension of authoritarianism have gained momentum since Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. At the same time, the global pandemic provided a window of opportunity to autocrats worldwide to fine-tune their modes of surveillance for the sake of regime survival. This article deconstructs Sino-Emirati relations in the field of digital surveillance. Inspired by Social Network Theory, we explore three transregional public-private elite networks as multipliers for the traveling of authoritarian practices. We show that authoritarian diffusion under the umbrella of fighting the pandemic is not spatially bound to geographical proximity or other structural similarities but rather a global phenomenon that state and non-state actors reproduce. (J Contemp China/GIGA)
