A comparative Study of French and American Cultural Involvement in the Persian Gulf States Since 1991

Two Persian Gulf states, mainly Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have managed during the last decade to diversify their image in the West through culture. They are not anymore only associated to oil in the Western media. Besides a new regional contemporary art market based in Dubai, museums have been playing a major role in this process. The most publicized among them are the Louvre and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, based on partnerships with world-renowned American and French institutions: The Louvre Museum in Paris and the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. They are the international flagships of a “cultural district” under development on Saadiyat Island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. This post-doctoral research at Stanford University in the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies will rely on a doctoral thesis defended at Sciences Po Paris in 2013. But it will expand it in a new direction. It’s target won’t be to anymore to understand the new projects in their national and regional environment but to use the cultural platforms as a lens to compare France and the United States in their relations to the Muslim world since the 1991 Gulf War.