ABSTRACT
Penetrating Native Spaces e histories of foreign inuence in the Middle East have come to be dominated by numerous military interventions. e dominance of hard power has helped mask the equally inuential role that ‘soer’ forms have had on shaping local cultures and societies. e construction of the ‘Orient’, as what Edward Said called a ‘living tableau of queerness’, has been ripped from the pages of Goethe, Flaubert and Renan, and is now presented through a new mixture of government, NGO, philanthropic and private ows (Said, 1988: 103). is chapter, therefore, attempts to construct an alternative genealogy of interventions in the Arab region by putting non-militaristic and diplomatic techniques at the heart of the story of inuences to shape the character of the contemporary Middle East. e particular role of educational support and training, which is oen sold as a benign and benevolent practice, has historically been central to such cultural strategies. is is evident from the growing inuence of foreign universities in the Middle East during British and French colonial rule, to the development of philanthropic funds, Fulbright scholarships and the restructuring and re-facultisation of university departments under the auspices of the United States – whose inuence in the region has come to replace that of the former colonisers in the post-Cold War era. Moreover, such processes have been considerably aected by today’s era of globalisation, with its increasing spread of North American universities across the globe and the more general trend of the privatisation of higher education. ese global processes are having a considerable impact on present trends in the development of higher education in the Middle East.
