Gulf Studies

Employing an empirical and comparative approach, this research paper analyses the past record and future trends of economic diversification efforts in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Applying the methodology of content analysis, possible future diversification trends are studied from current development plans and national visions published by the GCC governments. The past record of diversification has yielded only meagre results. Current development plans point unanimously to diversification as the means to secure the stability and the sustainability of income levels in the future. Even though the states continue to lead the economies, diversification entails a reinvigoration of the private sector and as such necessitates the implementation of broader reforms. The paper, however, questions the likelihood of diversification plans being translated into action. There are a number of structural barriers to diversification, which relate to the growth scenarios for the world economy, the duplication of economic activities among the GCC states, and, not least, the sizable barriers to interregional trade. Furthermore, the policy response to pre-empt the Arab Spring uprising indicates that these regimes easily give up their well-argued and planned policies when under pressure and fall back on established ways of doing business, namely through patronage and the predominant role of the public sector. Hence, the prospect of diversifying economies through politically difficult economic reforms has suffered a significant setback. This conclusion, however, does not rule out a piecemeal and ad hoc implementation of the diversification strategies in the future.

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Bahrain’s Royal Family, the Al Khalifa, has long pursued a strategy of divide and rule in order to prevent the emergence of cross-opposition coalitions, while exacerbating the country’s sectarian divide has become a critical means of ensuring regime survival. This article examines the country’s twentieth century imperial and post-independence history through the framework of divide and rule theory, providing crucial context for current events in Bahrain. It demonstrates how a divide and rule strategy is structurally embedded within the ruling family’s mode of governance, and reveals how it continues to be employed as an effective means of maintaining absolute monarchy in Bahrain.

Keywords: Bahrain, Arab Spring, Gulf Cooperation Council, divide and rule, sectarianism

Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf that investigated immobilities and mobilities as well as familial love in the lives of migrant workers. Although her data concentrate mainly on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), her arguments are relevant to other countries in the area with a signifi- cant presence of domestic workers. The book offers a deeply original reading of migration and intimacy.

Héritier du trône, le prince Mohammed Ben Salman entend réformer le royaume saoudien de manière profonde et sur tous les plans. Ses promesses de s’attaquer aux causes de l’extrémisme ne sont pas forcément synonymes d’une « déwahhabisation » du pays. Soutien et caution religieuse de la monarchie, les dignitaires wahhabites ont toujours su s’adapter aux précédentes tentatives de contrôle.

The Yemen, is the birth place and hub for a number of monotheistic religious convictions . In its North West region, just 243 kilometers away from San'aa, the official capital of the Republic of Yemen , lies a spiritual center, a holy metropolis known as Saa'da  .
It is to Zaidi Islam as Qum is to Shia Islam and Mecca is to Sunni Islam. It is where the scholars dwell, to read, learn and teach their disciples to carry on the doctrine and preserve the faith throughout history.
It is here that the Houthi phenomenon first appeared.
This study focuses on the very beginnings of Houthism as a phenomenon, it's source and affiliations. It is but the first part of a series of papers that will delve into the movement as it expands over time.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Kuwait's homes-to-buy programs had far reaching consequences on residential planning. They established the single-family house in the suburb as the standard for " modern " living. Unlicensed transformative practices enabled customization of state built homes, while housing benefits helped Kuwaitis construct their dream house. Thus, collective models for living, such as the Al-Sawaber project, that do not support these standards have been publicly resisted. As the only built medium density housing in Kuwait City, it marked a shift in residential typology from single-family units in the suburbs to collective living in the city. Today it is under threat of demolition and has failed to establish the apartment as a suitable model for the Kuwaiti family. The paper offers another reading on the " modern " house and the processes that lead to the normalization of one form of housing consumption over another. It also proposes adaptive reuse strategies to repurpose the existing building stock, illustrating the ways in which these practices can be agents in reshaping the history of modern housing, while providing a more sustainable and affordable approach to the problem of habitat.

This chapter traces the birth, rise, and evolution of political movements in Bahrain throughout the long twentieth century, taking as its starting point the beginning of direct British presence in the local political scene in 1900, and ending with the aftermath of the mass protests that engulfed the islands in 2011. It highlights four intersecting dichotomies that have characterized these political movements across time: trans-sectarian versus ethnosectarian, national versus transnational, reformist versus revolutionary, and public versus underground. It sheds light on the importance of externally imposed structural factors on local developments on the island, including British colonial absolutist rule, the discovery of oil and the subsequent fluctuation in the commodity's global prices, and the rise of American hegemony. Taking its cue from the work of the autonomistas, the analysis also highlights the central role that political movements have played in shaping the actions and reactions of the state. The state's attempts to contain these movements, and the contestation between the two sides, played a central role in shaping the contours of both state and society across Bahrain's long century.

There has been a media revolution in Saudi Arabia, one that is has been tightly linked to internet technologies. YouTube, in particular, has allowed amateur Saudi youth to independently utilise popular culture and humour as potent vehicles to engage with sensitive socio-political issues and develop a virtual public sphere, turning this online platform into the cinema that the Saudis had long been deprived of. Furthermore, these shows represented a radical shift in the history of participation of Saudis in media and entertainment production and the shaping of the local social consciousness. Still, Saudi Arabia, as a case study, forces us to avoid the narrow, deterministic, technological logic that privileges the liberating power of media. The independent characteristics of the platform allowed for self-expression, which, however, became regulated and institutionalised, transforming YouTube into an ad-friendly mediascape. Consequently, this amateur content was refashioned into professionally produced audiovisual media to accommodate the public taste and the dominant market logic, and the Saudi YouTube phenomenon that started with critical attitudes turned into an aspect of capitalist power, marginalising the independent voices.

This handbook brings together a mix of established and emerging international scholars to provide valuable analytical insights as to how China’s growing Middle East presence affects intra-regional development, trade, security, and diplomacy.

On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors-an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic routes. With no domestic agriculture to speak of, Qatar's external logistics networks are essential for maintaining its food supply. The country's 2.6 million residents, many of whom flooded the grocery stores, were understandably concerned about their ability to secure food when news about the embargo broke. Eventually, new food supply chains were established, primarily with the assistance of partners in Iran and Turkey. The ongoing rift between Qatar and its neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, manifested only in part by this effort to undermine the country's material supply networks raises a number of questions about an old idea: that of food as a 'weapon'. This article puts this concept in historical and regional perspective in the Arabian Peninsula through the lens of critical geopolitics, tracing the securitizing discourses about food security and their intertwining with narratives about territorial sovereignty, nationalism, and essentialist understandings of geography to explain the causes and effects of the food embargo in the ongoing Qatar-Gulf rift.

The long 1960s in the Gulf States was a period of great political changes, in which struggles over the very future of the region's political systems were fought out. Some of these struggles are still written out of the official histories of these countries. They are also seldom mentioned in the academic literature on the region, as they do not fit into dominant paradigms of the rentier state, authoritarianism, or Islam, and are also often left out in accounts on the Global Cold War more broadly.

The Palestinian-Israeli problem has been the most significant obstacle in the peace process in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration between the British Empire and the Zionists in 1917, which explicitly declared support for creating a "national home for the Jewish people" at the expense of the Palestinians, began after the Jewish exodus to Palestine after WW1. There have been three wars between Arab-Israel and Zionist imperial control over the Palestinians, resulting in the displacement of millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths of the Palestinians. Since the 1948 war, there have been no official Arab-Israeli relations except for Egypt and Jordan. However, geopolitical changes over the last decade have completely disrupted the Middle East and North Africa's conventional political order thanks to the Arab Spring, the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS, and new non-Arab hegemonial forces like Iran and Turkey. Over the last decade, these developments have altered the perspective of the Arab monarchies towards the Palestinian issue, which they conceive as a mere distraction from real immediate threats. It finally contributed to Abraham's agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel and then the agreement between Bahrain and Israel. While there is the considerable fuss about the agreement, it will only lead to more conflict and chaos in the MENA region from a pragmatic point of view, as has emerged in the recent developments in Libya and the Mediterranean Sea.

The UAE’s and Germany’s approaches towards stabilization are fundamentally different in their relation to national authorities, non-state actors, and multilateral cooperation. Nevertheless, cooperation can be furthered in specific key areas where common interests prevail, such as police training and demining activities in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Neither Saudi Arabia nor the United States is rushing to retaliate for a brazen, allegedly Iranian attack that severely damaged two of the kingdom’s key oil facilities.

That is not to say that Saudi Arabia and/or the United States will not retaliate in what could prove to be a game changer in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Yet, reading the tea leaves of various US and Saudi statements lifts the veil on the constituent elements that could change the region’s dynamics.

In an era of economic expansion and speedy urbanisation along with changing food preferences, the food balance equation has been disturbed that has resulted in " food gap "-a serious food security issue-even in rich gulf rich monarchies like Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although such food deficit nations manage to supplement for this gap by importing foods, it alone cannot serve to be a reliable alternative since exporting countries have their own premises and conditions to be looked after. To tackle with such worrisome event of global food crisis, the World Food Conference (1974) adopted the concept of " food security'' that mainly focuses on-food availability, food access, security and utilisation. Dealing with the challenge of catering to the Kingdom's population, estimated to exceed 38 million by 2030, this paper provides a detailed insight into its domestic agricultural production and why Saudi food supply is very vulnerable and highly dependent on the world food market. This paper begins by elaborating on the discussion with respect to location, topography, climate etc, of the study area as these natural factors that make Saudi Arabia highly vulnerable in the food market. Finally, it examines the various types of strategies adopted to improve food security emphasises on factors which increase food demand and limit food production.

Sectarian rhetoric is escalating across the Middle East region in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring moment of 2011, the recent Iran nuclear deal, as well as the Saudi-lead campaign in Yemen intended to curb Iranian influence in the region. This sectarian tone has colored not just the region’s politics, but also its media, most evident in satellite television broadcasting. Hezbollah’s Al Manar
(the Beacon) is widely watched by the region’s Shi’a, many of whom live in the Gulf, and the channel often conflates religious and political content. Saudi Arabia and their Sunni allies have worked to remove overtly Shi’a channels (such as Al Manar and the Iranian Arabic-language Al Alam) from the region’s satellites, while military personalities in the region have singled out Al Manar as a threat to regional
security. These disputes over satellite broadcast content even prompted some to brand this as the new “Middle Eastern War of the Airwaves.” Spanning the issues of media, religion, and politics, this paper focuses on the predominance of sectarian politics in satellite television in the Gulf sub-region using
Al Manar as a case study. While censorship of channels and content based on rationales other than sectarianism does exist, this paper focuses on the specific impact of sectarianism and Shi’a religious and political content in satellite television within the contemporary political environment. This paper explores how Al Manar, as the most prominent Shi’a religious and political outlet in the Gulf, has been targeted by Sunni powers for censorship, and how the channel’s content, as both religious and political, is perceived as threatening by Sunni rulers in the Gulf. These
themes are explored in the context of fierce Saudi-Iranian geopolitical and regional competition that has transcended the political realm and become intricately infused in the region’s media and public sphere.

Based on a five-year urban ethnography, this article explores the subjectivities of permanent temporariness that characterize the experience of serial migrant mothers in Dubai. By going beyond approaches that select middle class participants based on fixed category classifications such as ethnicity or citizenship, this article uses a processual lens and sheds light on a sociologically unmarked category of migrants in the city whose experiences of mothering and work have been shaped by shifting intersectionality in the context of multinational migration. Through detailed biographies of four serial migrants, this article offers an illustration of the subjectivities of permanent temporariness and shows how they are reproduced through three mothering practices: propagating roots, reflexive selving, and normalizing movement. Examining serial migrant motherhood practices challenges methodological nationalism and illustrates how the flow and friction of multinational migration gets reconstituted into family and work lives.

This is my chapter in the volume entitled 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑅𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑑𝑔𝑒 𝐻𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝐺𝑢𝑙𝑓 𝑃𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠, edited by Mehran Kamrava. It taps into archival documents, seminal work on the Kuwaiti Constitution by Tahani AlTerkait, useful insights by Shafeeq Ghabra, and also constructive feedback by Hamad Al-Bloshi.

An overview of the volume is as follows:
"The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Persian Gulf politics, history, economics, and society.
The volume begins its examination of Ottoman rule in the Arabian Peninsula, exploring other dimensions of the region’s history up until and after independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring scholars from a range of disciplines, the book demonstrates how the Persian Gulf’s current, complex politics is a product of interwoven dynamics rooted in historical developments and memories, profound social, cultural, and economic changes underway since the 1980s and the 1990s, and inter-state and international relations among both regional actors and between them and the rest of the world. The book comprises a total of 36 individual chapters divided into the following six sections:

• Historical Context
• Society and Culture
• Economic Development
• Domestic Politics
• Regional Security Dynamics
• The Persian Gulf and the World

Examining the Persian Gulf’s increasing importance in regional politics, diplomacy, economics, and security issues, the volume is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and policy makers interested in political science, history, Gulf studies, and the Middle East."

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Urban Modernity in the Contemporary Gulf offers a timely and engaging discussion on architectural production in the modernization era in the Arabian Peninsula. Focusing on the 20th century as a starting point, the book explores the display of transnational architectural practices resulting in different notions of locality, cosmopolitanism, and modernity. Contextually, with an eye on the present, the book reflects on the initiatives that recently re-engaged with the once ville moderne which, meanwhile, lost its pivotal function and meaning.

A city within a bigger city, the urban fabric produced during the modernization era has the potential to narrate the social growth, East–West dynamics, and citizens’ memories of the recent past. Reading obsolescence as an opportunity, the book looks into this topic from a cross-country perspective. It maps, reads and analyses the notion of modern heritage in relation to the contemporary city and looks beyond physical transformations to embrace cultural practices and strategies of urban re-appropriation. It interrogates the value of modern architecture in the non-West, examining how academic research is expanding the debate on Gulf urbanism, and describes how practices of reuse could foster rethinking neglected areas, also addressing land consumption in the GCC.

Presenting a diverse and geographically inclusive authorship, which combines established and up-and-coming researchers in the field, this is an important reference for academics and upper-level students interested in heritage studies, post-colonial urbanism, and architecture in the non-West.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

في العقد الأخير (2001-2011) أصبحت قطر من أكثر الدول العربية نموا وتقدما، كما أصبحت الدولة الأغنى في العالم ، وقد ساهمت البيئة الاقتصادية والثقافية والاجتماعية والسياسية الايجابية والمستقرة في خلق تجربة تنموية واستثمارية متميزة على صعيد الشرق الأوسط بأكمله . ولا يمكن أن يتجاوز منصف النهضة العمرانية والمعمارية الغير مسبوقة التي تشهدها قطر وتلك النهضة التي توازن بين القيم التاريخية للتراث والطموحات اللامحدودة للتطور والنمو الكمي والنوعي بلورت مكانا جديدا لقطر ومدنها وخاصة الدوحة لتؤسس مكانا بارزا على المسرح العالمي للمدن الجاذبة والمشجعة على أنماط متميزة من الحياة والأكثر أهمية ان هذا الطرح يندمج مع زيادة مستمرة في الوعي البيئي وأهمية تحقيق تنمية مستدامة مبشرة للأجيال القادمة. أن قطر بصفة خاصة ودول منطقة الخليج بصفة عامة تشهد متغيرات تنموية واستثمارية ذات انعكاسات معمارية وعمرانية غير مسبوقة وتستحق يقظة الباحث والمحلل والمصمم ومتخذ القرار. والنتاج المعماري والعمراني والتخطيطي في السنوات الأخيرة يستحق التقييم والتفاعل المستمر كما أن النظرة الناضجة إلى تراث قطر التقليدي تستحق الدعم والاستمرارية ومن ثم خلق تيارات متعددة ومتنوعة للتعامل مع التحديات التنموية في قطر المعاصرة. تساؤلات شديدة الأهمية عن التحولات المعاصرة في مدن الخليج عامة وقطر خاصة مع التوجه نحو التنوع الاقتصادي وتجاوز حقبة الاعتماد الكامل على النفط كركيزة اقتصادية جوهرية وظهور تصورات جديدة في العمارة والعمران في عصر ما بعد النفط وعصر الاقتصاد المعرفي الإبداعي .

وعلى مستوى التأثير العالمي سيناقش البحث بصورة خاصة ثلاث ظواهر جوهرية وشمولية التأثير وهى بالترتيب : العولمة والتنمية المتواصلة والحقبة الرقمية الناتجة عن ثورة المعلومات التي ساهمت في ظهور تصنيف جديد من المشروعات في قطر وهي المشروعات ايقونية الطابع التي لا تؤثر فقط على التطور والتشكيل المعماري والعمراني لدولة قطر وإنما يمتد تأثيرها إقليميا وعربيا مثل مشروع اللؤلؤة العقاري ومدينة لوسيل ومشيرب قلب الدوحة. وتعتمد الرؤية البحثية على التركيز على تحليل طموحات الدوحة في تحدي النقص المعرفي وعبور الفجوة الرقمية ومحاولات إنشاء مجتمعات المعرفة Knowledge Communities التي ترتكز على أن المساهمة في إبداع مستقبل الكيان الإنساني ومستقبل البشرية هو ركيزة التطور فى الاقتصاد المعتمد على المعرفة Knowledge Economy  .
يقدم البحث تعريفا لتوجهات التنمية العمرانية والتخطيطية واليات الاستثمار في مدينة الدوحة وعلاقتها بالتصور المستقبلي لتخطيط المدينة على ركائز الاقتصاد المعرفي والإبداعي. كما يحلل البحث آليات التنمية العمرانية التي تستوعب التوجهات والرغبات الاستثمارية في إطار الخطة الشاملة لتنمية الدوحة ورؤية تنمية قطر 2030، ويهدف البحث إلى تقديم إطارا منهجيا شاملا لتقييم واحدة من أهم التجارب التنموية الاستثمارية بالمدن العربية في العقد الأخير.

The Arab world has enjoyed geostrategic importance since historical times as seen in the flourishing of trade and commerce, production of knowledge during what has been nostalgically referred to as the Islamic golden age, and most recently the discovery of energy resources critical to the stability of the international system. However, the region's particularistic and unique socio-cultural and political divisions have not lent themselves to easy analysis. Among others, one of the main difficulties in understanding the region is the space it occupies between tradition and modernity. This space has been shaped since history by the interloping forces of religion, economics and geopolitics, which in turn were sharpened and transformed by the respective colonial experiences that birthed nationalism followed by etatism as a means to legitimising the sovereign authority of the state (as dominated by a regime or leader). Thus resulted the fraught creation of the modern Arab nation-states, forced to embrace the capitalist economic system and its attendant structural and administrative requirements.
In an effort to understand this dialectical opposition between the forces of tradition and modernity, the paper focuses on the role of religious ideology and political consolidation in shaping the contours of the Saudi kingdom's state formation and sustenance. The dynamic between the intertwined assertions of the Sunni Wahhabi religious tradition on the one hand and the politically entrenched power of the Al-Saud regime on the other, underscores the intermeshed duality of the Saudi state. This means that even if the Saudi state is the instrument of modernization, it also simultaneously pursues policies to ensure its legitimacy through particular conventions, in this case, the Wahhabist religious movement in the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam. The paper will thus investigate the means and methods employed within the state towards achieving change with continuity, development with stability and reform and the regime maintenance of the Ibn Saud family.