Dr Mohammed Alsudairi

Position: Lecturer in Politics and International Relations (The Arabian Peninsula, China and the Middle East)

School and/or Centres: Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies

Email: Mohammed.Alsudairi@anu.edu.au

Researcher profile: https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/mohammed-alsudairi

Biography
Publications

Mohammed Alsudairi is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations of the Arabic Speaking World. He holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), an MA in International Relations and International History from the London School of Economics and Peking University, and a BSc in International Politics from Georgetown University. Prior to his appointment at CAIS, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at HKU, working on a project examining the intersections between religion and infrastructure in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Since 2015, he oversaw the development of the Asian Studies Program at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. More recently in 2022, he was awarded a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work on his upcoming book manuscript.

Informed by a multidisciplinary and multilingual approach, Alsudairi’s research focuses on the historical and contemporary connections between the Middle East and East Asia; the histories of transnational revolutionary and counter-revolutionary networks in the Arab world; ideological security bureaucracies and state-led cultural engineering practices across Asia; and Muslim religiosities and sectarian identities in the Middle East, China, among others. His academic work has appeared in multiple academic journals including The Middle East Journal, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Arabian Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Global Policy, and Oxford University’s Journal of Islamic Studies.

Ghiselli, A & Alsudairi, M 2022, “Exploiting China’s Rise: Syria’s Strategic Narrative and China’s Participation in Middle Eastern Politics”, Global Policy, pp. 1–17.

Alsudairi, M 2021, “Traditions of Maturidism and Anti-Wahhabism in China: An Account of the Yihewani Hard-liners of the Northwest”, Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 354–382.

Yan, X & Alsudairi, M 2021, “Guarding Against the Threat of a Westernising Education: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Saudi Cultural Security Discourses and Practices Towards Overseas Study”, Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 30, no. 131, pp. 803-819.

Alsudairi, M 2020, “Arab encounters with Maoist China: Transnational journeys, diasporic lives and intellectual discourses”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 503–524.

Alsudairi, M & Wang, T 2020. “A Near-Normalisation? Sino-Saudi Diplomatic Flirtations between 1955 and 1957”, Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 567-580.

Alsudairi, M 2019, “Marx’s Arabian Apostles: The Rise and Fall of the Saudi Communist Movement”, The Middle East Journal, vol. 73, no. 3, pp. 438–457.

Alsudairi, M 2018 “China as the New Religious Frontier for the Da’wah: Analyzing the Emergence of a China-oriented Missionary Impulse in Saudi Arabia”, Journal of Arabian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp.225–246.

Alsudairi, M 2016 “Adhering to the Ways of Our Western Brothers: Tracing Saudi Influences on the Development of Chinese Salafism”, Sociology of Islam, vol. 4, no. 1-2, pp. 27–58.