Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how China–Saudi economic cooperation and dispute-resolution choices (ICSID vs ADR) reshape development, sovereignty and policy space amid renewed US–China rivalry, using treaties and interviews to show how Gulf ‘connector states’ navigate great-power competition.

Paper long abstract

Cold War–era development was explicitly structured around US–Soviet rivalry, yet contemporary development scholarship has often bracketed out great power competition. This paper recentres geopolitics by examining how China–Saudi economic cooperation reconfigures development, sovereignty and legal order under intensifying US–China tensions. Focusing on large-scale energy and infrastructure projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and Vision 2030, it analyses how the choice between ICSID-style Investor–State Dispute Settlement and more flexible, culturally embedded Alternative Dispute Resolution (mediation, med-arb, Sulh) shapes policy autonomy and bargaining power. Drawing on treaty texts, arbitration rules and elite interviews with mediators, commercial lawyers and policy experts in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and mainland China, the paper shows how Riyadh leverages forum selection, dispute-resolution clauses and “non-interference” narratives to diversify beyond Western legal dependence while avoiding overreliance on Beijing. It argues that China’s promotion of ADR constitutes not only a technocratic efficiency fix but also a strategy to build parallel legal infrastructures in the Global South. The analysis contributes to debates on how renewed great power competition restructures development trajectories, particularly for “connector states” in the Gulf seeking to convert geopolitical rivalry into developmental advantage.