A New Global Order? Implications of the US-Israeli Attacks on Iran for the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia

Asma Abdi is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter and an incoming Lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Manchester. Her research and teaching sit at the intersection of global political economy, feminist theory, and de/postcolonial approaches. She has researched and published on themes of social reproduction, informality, gender and political economy of war and sanctions in Iran. Asma’s work has received several awards, including the 2025 Political Studies Association (PSA) Elizabeth Wiskemann Prize for the best PhD dissertation in the study of (in)Equality and Social Justice, and the 2025 Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best PhD dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic. 

Adam Hanieh is Director of the SOAS Middle East Institute, MBI Jaber Chair of Middle East Studies and Professor in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS. Prior to joining SOAS, he was a Professor and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Hanieh serves on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and is a Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute (TNI), headquartered in Amsterdam. His recent book, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso 2024) was co-winner of the 2025 Best Book by an International Scholar, Global and Transnational Section of the American Sociological Association. 

Froilan T. Malit, Jr. is an ESRC-UBEL PhD candidate at SOAS University of London (Department of Politics & International Studies), researching Global South migration and diplomacy in the Asia–Middle East region. He is a Gulf-Asia migration specialist focusing on international relations, foreign policy, labor rights, and the political economy of migration in the Gulf. He is a visiting fellow at the American University in Dubai and an associate researcher at the Gulf Labour Markets, Migration, and Population (GLMM). Over the past decade, he has worked as a technical project manager and migration policy research consultant for organizations including the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, the International Labor Organization, and the International Organization for Migration, and has held research roles at the American University of Sharjah, Zayed University, and the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and Cornell University, with additional postgraduate training at the European University Institute. 

Steve Tsang is Professor of China Studies and Director of the SOAS China Institute. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.  He previously served as the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and as Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.  Before that he spent 29 years at Oxford University, where he earned his D.Phil. and worked as a Professorial Fellow, Dean, and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony’s College.  He has a broad area of research interest and has published extensively, including five single authored and fourteen collaborative books.  His most recent (with Olivia Cheung) is The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (Oxford University Press, 2024), with a paperback edition for release in 2026.  His new book (with Olivia Cheung), China’s Global Strategy under Xi Jinping, will be published by OUP on 1 September 2026.

Stephen A. Murphy is the Director of the Centre of South East Asian Studies, and the Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at SOAS, University of London. He specializes in the art and archaeology of Buddhism and Hinduism in first millennium CE Southeast Asia with a focus on Thailand and Laos. He has a particular interest in the 7th to 9th centuries CE as well as maritime connectivity between Southeast Asian cultures, Tang China, and the Indian Ocean world in general. His museological focus engages with issues of restitution and curation of Asian art. His recent book, Buddhist Landscapes of the Khorat Plateau: Art and Archaeology of the 7th–11th Centuries (NUS Press 2024), explores the art historical and archaeological evidence for Buddhism on the Khorat Plateau (Northeast Thailand and Central Laos). He is co-editor, with Alan Chong, of The Tang Shipwreck: Art and exchange in the 9th century (2017) and regularly contributes papers to leading academic journals such as Antiquity, Asian Perspectives, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies amongst others.