Language education for sustainable development in the Middle East: a critical integrative review of multilingual justice, digital inclusion, and sociocultural resilience

This critical integrative review examines how recent scholarship conceptualizes the relationship between language education and sustainable development in Middle Eastern contexts. It interrogates sustainability as an analytical frame that shapes what becomes visible and what remains obscured when language-in-education questions are approached through inclusion, resilience, digital transformation, and peacebuilding. Drawing on a structured search, 41 sources published between 2017 and 2024 were included in the analytic corpus, while pre-2017 works were retained as conceptual anchors. A focused secondary coding pass on the multilingual-justice subset traced whether the literature explicitly addressed financing, teacher preparation, assessment alignment, Arabic diglossia, and English-medium market pressures. Synthesized through an evidence matrix, the corpus clustered around four recurring themes: multilingual justice, digital inclusion, sociocultural resilience, and conflict-sensitive language planning. The analysis nevertheless reveals persistent blind spots: multilingual inclusion is often normatively endorsed without governance-level attention to financing, teacher preparation, curricular mediation, or institutional authority; digital inclusion is frequently reduced to connectivity and device access rather than linguistic usability; and resilience and social-cohesion claims are often weakly evidenced. The review argues that sustainable language education should be understood as a contested governance project through which recognition, distribution, and participation are negotiated.