After nearly 40 days of exchanging fire, the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire in the early hours of Wednesday (April 8). While there are clear reasons for relief, including Tehran stating that it will allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, questions remain about whether the pause will hold and what comes next.The fate of at least one country in the wider region is already somewhat unclear. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the truce will not apply to Lebanon, whose southern region has been invaded by Israel. This contradicts a statement by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who was a key mediator between Iran and the US.Gulf countries, too, face heightened uncertainty given the recent targeting of military and civilian infrastructure. Following US attacks on the Iran University of Science and technology, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) last week had designated American university branches in the region as “legitimate targets”. While Washington issued multiple advisories to all American university boards, including shifting to online classes, the deeper effects of the crisis will be borne by the Gulf monarchs. For years, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — focused on importing the world’s most prestigious academic infrastructure for cushioning economic growth in the future.Several long-term vision plans, like Saudi 2030 or We are UAE 2031, led to the establishment of sprawling foreign university campuses in the UAE and Qatar. These were part of efforts to transition these economies away from hydrocarbons and cultivate a knowledge economy, but the war has pointed out a familiar hurdle — the region’s kinetic geopolitics. Infrastructure of changeBy the mid-2000s, the realisation that oil was a finite resource and that GCC economies needed a strategic upheaval for the future was growing. A top-down mandate was issued for the transition into a knowledge-intensive economy.Qatar pioneered the regional model, beginning with an “Education City” launched in 2003 in Doha, importing elite American institutions like Georgetown, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon. These branch campuses are envisaged as maintaining the same educational standards, but at a lower comparative cost for students. In other cases, universities collaborate with foreign counterparts for research or to bring in foreign faculty members. The UAE followed, setting up heavily subsidised educational hubs like the New York University Abu Dhabi and the University of Wollongong in Dubai. To improve the viability of establishing Western educational systems in absolute monarchies, Gulf countries offered unprecedented relaxations. The introduction of special, longer-term visas for exceptional talent and the relaxation of social norms to recreate global academic ecosystems were two of the most prominent measures. In Saudi Arabia, even apart from the foreign collaborations, the drive for global legitimacy was so profound that the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology was a rare exception to the country’s strict gender segregation laws, offering education to both men and women.These centres were among the key drivers of national strategies prioritising education. The Qatar National Vision 2030 explicitly placed “Human Development” as its foremost pillar when allocating state funds. The UAE’s Vision 2021 plan (and the Centennial 2071 framework) anchored the nation’s post-oil transition on building a globally competitive, knowledge-based ecosystem. The Saudi Vision 2030 plan mandated closing the gap between higher education outputs and the requirements of the job market, forging partnerships with the private sector.Velocity of investmentStory continues below this adThe increased focus on educational reform was reflected not just in the budget allocations of countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, but also in the economic velocity of investment into projects over the years. The GCC education market had prepared a pipeline of sectoral investments worth $90 billion by 2015. From 2017 to 2019, the UAE dedicated roughly 20% of its total federal budget to education. By 2023, Qatar allocated 9% of its national budget to the sector, while Saudi Arabia poured a monumental $50.4 billion — 17% of its national budget — into education, proportionally dwarfing the spending of the United States and the United Kingdom.Dilemma of globalisationBy 2021, the GCC Statistical Centre stated that the region had attracted almost 2.2 million higher education students across 309 institutions for all member states.Supported by over 115,000 faculty members, the numbers indicate high retention rates for the Gulf — a mere 6.2% of the GCC’s higher education students were completing their education abroad. This statistic alone cannot be touted as painting an entirely successful story, however.Writing in the book Higher Education Revolutions in the Gulf Globalization and Institutional Viability, scholars Fatima Badry and John Willoughby note a point of fragility. Reliant on the “turnkey model,” this approach allows a single provider (in this case, the specific university) to manage the setup, operations and scale-up of the institution. This results in a situation where the GCC imported Western education models rather than building a pedagogy rooted in their own systems of thinking. The case of Saudi Arabia best displays this paradox: while the Kingdom invests billions to build its domestic universities, its Education Vision 2030 cannot materialise without securing American accreditation, which is contingent on the importation of Western faculty (and ideals).Moreover, the Gulf’s focus on importing the pro-capitalist and liberal focus of American society directly clashes with the administration’s deliberate suppression of “revolutionary political critique”, which generally accompanies liberal arts education.Story continues below this adEndangering regional security, with implications for Indian diasporaDespite the GCC’s collective push, major factors affecting this shift remain unaddressed. The historic geopolitical instability in the Middle East, coupled with the region’s cultural differences compared to Western societies, poses barriers for foreign talent. For years, Gulf American campuses operated under the assumption that hosting branded American assets like universities would insulate them from the region’s instability. In fact, many universities are situated near military outposts — like the Al Udeid Air Base, located 40 km away from Qatar’s Education City.Also Read | Explained: Why the Gulf matters for IndiaWith the IRGC’s threats vaporising that assumption, it is clear that at least Iran views these institutions as strategic American outposts operating in a potential war zone, affecting the GCC’s long-term vision.And, while Iran has cited its anti-Western stance for its attacks on US allies in the region, this disregards the demographic reality of education in the Middle East. Driven by geographic proximity, economic perspectives, and post-graduation employment pathways, Indian students and faculty form the backbone of the Gulf’s 2.2 million-strong academic ecosystem. Any IRGC strike on a US university in the Gulf is thus likely to affect a majority of non-American casualties.As demonstrated by Qatar University scholar Sharique Umar in a comparative international student migration study from 2023, these campuses are the intellectual engines for a massive, outperforming Global South diaspora. In countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, non-nationals accounted for almost 80% of the students.