Kanwal Hameed

Kanwal Hameed is an inter-disciplinary historian with a background in Middle East Studies, and previously a Visiting Post-doctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut. She received her PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) University of Exeter, UK in 2022.  Kanwal's research interests include modern histories of the Gulf and MENA regions, critical historiography, gender studies and social movements. Her work focusses on mid-20th century national, anti-colonial, and leftist movements in the Gulf, in particular an intergenerational radical tradition in Bahrain and Kuwait, and its entanglements with regional and global liberation movements. 

For the project Mapping Connections, China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East, Kanwal will be exploring bottom-up connections between China and movements for radical social transformation in the Middle East during the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Her project reads these connections outwards from the PFLOAG/PFLO (People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman/ and Arabian Gulf) and its allies from the site of the Dhofar revolution. Rather than presenting historical connections between two national entities, it posits Dhofar as a site that is linked to others in the region across space and time, and the PFLOAG as part of a network of movements which are local, regional, global. As well as tracing relations between China and revolutionary groups and actors at the Dhofar front it will also explore other forms of connection - diplomatic, cultural, and intellectual.  

This research sees the late 1960s to early 1970s as a crucial threshold in the ongoing shaping of global political and economic tendencies and is attentive to the role of revolutionary social actors in the making of this historic epoch. 

As well as an empirical study of the role of China-Middle East connections at this site during this time, the project is based on three principal questions: Are there counter-histories to the contemporary dominant narratives of Chinese-Middle Eastern connections that may have foretold other, suspended futures? What might these histories tell us about the political economy of social movements? And regarding the Middle East’s evolving relation with China to date, what do these shifting alliances tell us about worldmaking since the early 1970s?