DUBAI: Bringing together more than 300 scholars, policy officials and specialists, the Gulf Research Center will host its sixth annual Gulf Research Meeting at the University of Cambridge starting on Aug. 24.

The GCC Secretary-General Abdul Latif Al-Zayani will address it on Monday. He will be joined by Prof. Bahgat Korany of the American University in Cairo to present the findings of the latest Arab Human Development Report.

The objective of the annual gathering is to enhance knowledge about the Gulf, promote scholarly and balanced research about the region and to encourage scholarly and academic exchange among those working on or interested in the developments taking place that are defining the Gulf region and their constituent societies.

Starting on Aug. 25, 11 parallel running workshops will explore in-depth issues such as Gulf-Egypt relations, the future of Yemen’s unity, challenges and opportunities of economic diversification in the GCC states, the role of higher education development, Iran-GCC energy cooperation, enhancing researcher mobility for building knowledge-based societies in the Gulf, relations between the Gulf Cooperation Council and the BRIC countries, the role of intellectual property, migration policies, the arms trade and security market in the Gulf, and understanding the contemporary process of politics by formal and informal institutions in the region.

In these workshops, close to 200 papers will be presented and discussed. The workshops conclude on Aug. 27.

A particular emphasis of the meeting is to encourage young scholars, in particular from the GCC countries, to engage in the debate and take part in research collaborations. Over 100 scholars from the six GCC countries will take part in the meeting.