Razan Shawamreh is a scholar of Chinese foreign policy with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Beginning in the 2025–2026 academic year, she will join Al-Quds Bard College’s Master’s program as a lecturer.
Her research centers on China’s global rise and its evolving bilateral and multilateral relations with Arab states, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. Her work critically examines the diplomatic, economic, military, and soft power dimensions of China’s engagement in the region.
Her doctoral dissertation analyzed Chinese foreign policy toward MENA from 1978 to 2024 through the lens of partial hegemony, adopting a perspective of hegemonic rise. Using an inductive approach, she traced developments across diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural sectors in all 25 MENA countries to assess how China is positioning itself as a global actor. In addition to her dissertation, she has published scholarly work on China’s ambivalent stance on the Palestinian cause, its complex relationship with Zionism, and its responses to contemporary conflicts such as the wars in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Ukraine.
Her broader intellectual interests include the historical trajectories of rising powers in MENA. She draws comparisons with Great Britain’s pre-colonial presence and the United States’ early expansion into the region, exploring how current Chinese foreign policy mirrors or diverges from past patterns of global power engagement.
Her work contributes to contemporary debates on global order, rising powers, and the shifting geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. She is committed to interdisciplinary and historically grounded research that situates China’s foreign policy within broader global and regional transformations.
