Introduction

The Arab Gulf region is a global hotspot for universities’ offshore campus development. In 2020, 71 offshore campuses of foreign universities were operating in different Gulf countries, providing a selection of their home institutions’ degree programmes to students in situ. While that makes the Gulf a key region, besides Southeast Asia, for these brick-and-mortar types of university internationalisation strategies in general, they tend to be concentrated in certain cities. Here, three cities in particular stand out as major hosts for offshore campus development: Doha in Qatar (hosting 14 offshore campuses in 2022), and Dubai (hosting 30) and Ras al-Khaimah (hosting 9) in the United Arab Emirates. The governments managed to attract these large numbers of foreign higher education providers to their cities by establishing tailored infrastructures and exceptional regulatory frameworks. Most visibly, these education hub projects are anchored in transnational education zones (TEZs). This book seeks to answer the question of how and why do governments in the Arab Gulf region attract offshore campuses of foreign providers of higher education through TEZs.