Dress from the Gulf States: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates (original) (raw)
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International Journal of African and Asian Studies, 2016
Scholars of oil-based rentierism otherwise dubbed as 'the oil curse', claim that the political systems of such countries and their leaderships cannot be taken as serious development focused agents. In a similar contention, proponents of western-style democracy support the idea that 'sheikhdom' leadership based on patriarchic inheritance is destructive to development, while yet another section of scholars claims that Islam, as a faith, is in general anti-development. In order to broaden the debate on this subject, this study uses the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a case of a country that has achieved a tremendous success in various development areas and contrary to the old view of the three types of critics mentioned here. Introduction The United Arab Emirates (UAE) became the youngest state in the Middle East after gaining independence from the UK in 1971 and creating in 1972 a federation of seven small emirates. It has an average population of about 5 million, including a large number of expatriates who also constitute the majority of the workforce in the country. However, the International Monetary Fund had projected the population of the UAE to reach up to six million by 2015, increasing from 5.4 million in 2010, and that an increase in the number of expatriate population, considered over 80 per cent of the country's workforce, comprises the main growth drivers within the various areas of the country's economic development (IMF, 2011). The island city of Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE. Although it is the seat of the federal government, Abu Dhabi, as an emirate, is also composed of several regions which make it the largest among its federated sister emirates. With most of the oil and gas produced in the country extracted within the geographical boundary of the island, Abu Dhabi is indeed the richest individual emirate, making the UAE the second largest oil exporting country in the Middle East with a high concentration in the petrochemical industry. Despite Abu Dhabi's natural wealth, many people around the world think of Dubai as the capital of the country. This perception reigns due to Dubai's drastic measures in commercializing its potential in the areas of tourism, real estate, and the maritime business, particularly offering free port facilities for goods destined to other countries in the region and far beyond the Gulf region. As such, Dubai enjoys being the commercial hub of the country and possibly of the entire Gulf region. An attractive policy of short-stay tourist visa system has contributed massively towards Dubai's popularity at the global scene with numerous academic, industrial, commercial as well as professional seminars, workshops, conferences and other high profile celebrity events held in the emirate. The UAE is sometimes lumped together with its Gulf neighbors when the discussion is about political environment and structure of the states in the region. For instance, it is common to hear terms like Gulf Arab States or Arab Gulf States or the Persian Gulf Arab States, referring to the six Arab nations that formed in 1981 the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) consisting of Bahrain, Kuwait, The Sultanate of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The grouping up, though providing descriptive similarities, seems to undermine the internal differences the countries have in their social and political structures, leadership selection and even compositions and constitutions of the states (Aartun, 2001). The similarity may be drawn from the patrimonial inheritance of the rulership and other traditional hierarchical factors relating to the patrilineal ascension to the crown. But the distinctness of the UAE from its sister neighbours becomes clear when some consideration is given to the function of the first adjective in the country's name 'United', which symbolizes the federal type of government which the UAE embraces, unlike the other Gulf states. Secondly, the UAE, though a Muslim state, does not have tendencies of adherence to Islamic conservatism as a national political guideline or constitution (Bill & Springborg, 2000). It practices a modest quality of Islam which complies with the principles of the sharia while at the same time harmonizing it with the modern doctrines of contemporary socioeconomic systems. This is to argue that it has opted to adhere to both the principles of the Federation and of the Islamic doctrine, fulfilling simultaneously the requirements of a
Political Reform & Economic Diversification in the Gulf: Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates
Many experts have argued that the oil-rich Gulf monarchies are resistant to liberalization, exempt from the rules of traditional modernization theories. When analyzing the world as a whole, it is easy to lump the Gulf monarchies into one monolithic oil-filled entity, one that seems to break theoretical molds. In doing so, the separate experiences and intricacies that affect the evolutions of these separate states, no matter how small both the differences and evolutions may seem, are overlooked to the detriment of a thorough and meaningful analysis of this so-called exceptional region. This paper will examine the cases of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in order to demonstrate the importance of taking a closer look when analyzing the political and economic development of the Gulf. The paper will also show how, similar to traditional modernization theory, economic and political developments are indeed intertwined even in the Gulf, albeit in a way that is unique to the contexts of these countries. In a general sense, as small, oil-rich Gulf monarchies, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are very similar. They have weathered imperialist interests and threats, successfully accumulated immense oil wealth, built massive welfare states, and maintained their monarchical power throughout the Arab spring. However, the pre-oil and early oil experiences of the two states differ in ways that may seem both minor and bygone, but that have important implications on the different current political, social, and economic atmospheres of the two nations today. These differences in turn affect the viability and likelihood of challenges faced by the governments. As posited by Middle East scholar Marc Lynch, the recent uprisings in the Arab world were caused by “authoritarian retrenchment, unfulfilled economic promises, rising sectarianism at the popular level, and deep frustration among an increasingly tech-savvy rising generation” (Lynch 2011). The differences in the experiences between the UAE and Kuwait during the Arab spring, particularly taking into consideration the extent to which these countries experienced the four components described by Lynch, can largely be explained by the two states’ pre-oil experiences and the subsequent structuring of the political and economic systems that exist today, providing an explanative framework rather than a dismissive exemption for the oil-rich Gulf.
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‘Writing’ small states: contextualizing the construct in the Arab Gulf
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How do IR scholars ‘write’ the Arab Gulf? In attempting to address this question, the focus is twofold: first, the ‘small state’ as a construct and second, its application to the study of Gulf small states. The article tries to grapple with issues inherent in such an enterprise by providing a critical assessment of recent scholarship on the topic, with special reference to Qatar and the UAE. The problematic comes to the fore in a context of these two countries’ increasing regional and international visibility, as well as what seems to be renewed scholarly interest in small states, more generally. Specifically, this analysis primarily seeks to relativize the small state within the Arab Gulf sub-region, drawing attention to ontological and epistemological issues. In so doing, the article offers some heuristics for the writing of small states in the Arab Gulf. One suggestion put forward in the article is more scrutiny of the regional context; what is called here the ‘hydrocarbon semi-p...
Regimes, Identities, and Regional Order: Kuwait, Qatar, and the Gulf Cooperation Council
Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2018
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is an authoritarian regional organization whose unity among its six constituent kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman waxes and wanes in cyclical fashion. Historically, periods of cross-regime cohesion have been followed by defection. This essay examines the GCC since the Arab Spring, characterized by crisis-fueled unity, followed by sharp divergence from Kuwait and Qatar in two regards: Kuwait by refusing to ratify an internal security pact that would have transnationalized standards of repression, and Qatar by maintaining an activist foreign policy that defied GCC consensus by engaging Iran, Islamists, and other GCC foes. Unlike conventional neorealist explanations, this essay argues that such small state defections from regional order stem not from a desire to compensate for security weaknesses but rather from an effort to protect their underlying regime identities. In Kuwait, constitutive norms of domestic pluralism and openness, rooted in historical tradition, so permeates the Sabah dynasty and its societal linkages that integrating Gulf standards of coercion is seen as profoundly incompatible. In Qatar, a new relational understanding of the Thani monarchy as an activist global force, distinct from its Gulf peers, negates the impulse for deeper regional integration. The reassertion of these regime identities helps explain resistance to regionalism even when bandwagoning with the GCC majority would objectively enhance state survival. In sum, domestic order trumps regional order.