DOHA: When Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic, trade and travel links with Qatar last June, accusing it of supporting terrorist groups, Saudi milk was not the only commodity that disappeared from supermarket shelves here. Qatar imports 90 percent of its food requirements, and 40 percent of that had come through its only land border, with Saudi Arabia.
Faced with the risk of isolation and disruption of the food supply, Qatar quickly diversified its trade relations, reaching out to countries such as Turkey, Kuwait and Oman. This political and economic rapprochement was reflected in research collaborations between Qatar and its new partners, too. In October, the Qatar National Research Fund joined hands with the Turkish research council, known as Tubitak, to fund a program to strengthen cybersecurity in both countries.
Hamad Al-Ibrahim, executive vice president for research and development at the Qatar Foundation, called the agreement a product of “science diplomacy.” “This is not a research event anymore,” Al-Ibrahim said. “It’s an event to tackle cybersecurity from a policy perspective, an infrastructure perspective and a public-awareness perspective.” The threat of cybercrime has escalated in Persian Gulf countries in recent years. The ICS Cyber Security Forum estimated the cost of cyber attacks in the Gulf region at $1 billion annually. In Qatar, cybercrime increased by 52 percent in 2015, according to a statement by the governor of Qatar’s central bank, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Saud Al-Thani. A hack of the Qatar News Agency’s website last May helped spark the diplomatic rift between Qatar and its neighbors, further emphasizing the urgency of building the country’s resilience to cybercrimes. The Qatari-Turkish collaboration follows a model called 2+2 that links academic and industry researchers from two different countries to better cope with the multi-dimensional cyber challenges. Such connections between research and industrial applications are often missing in Arab countries. Murat Yesiltas, director of security studies at the Foundation for Economic, Political and Social Research, in Turkey, considers the research relationship between the two countries strategic, and not a reaction to the current diplomatic crisis.
