This talk explores how and why Saudi Arabia burst onto the landscape of world football in 2023 and examines what the speed and scale of Saudi engagement, as investor, owner, sponsor, host, and participant, means for the Kingdom and for football more broadly. Analysis will place Saudi Arabia’s startling emergence as one of the hubs in world football in the 2020s in historical and comparative perspective, set against previous periods of Saudi investment in football, in the 1970s, and attempts elsewhere to rapidly kickstart the domestic game, in the United States, Japan, and China.

Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French ‘mandate’ carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war.

In this talk, I explore how Saudi legal thought is shaping the ways in which Islamic law is applied by Islamic courts beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Since the 1960s, Saudi Arabia has made significant efforts to promote a distinct Saudi understanding of Islam globally, mainly through international students at Saudi universities such as the Islamic University of Medina.

'Twelve Years Away from Constantinople' was an instant classic in its time. For well over a century, it has endured as a uniquely candid and entertaining account of Armenian émigré life during the reign of the authoritarian Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II. Best known for his trenchant satires, its extraordinarily cosmopolitan author, Yervant Odian, was and remains one of the most recognizable and active figures of his generation.