Gulf Juggernaut: Review of Adam Hanieh, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States

Summary Report 3, 2011

The Political Economy of the Gulf Summary Report details research conducted at the CIRS "Political Economy of the Gulf" working group meetings held in Doha over the course of two years. The project was launched in 2009. As with other CIRS research initiatives, after a thorough review of existing literature on the topic, certain gaps were identified meriting further original research and scholarship. Select scholars were invited to participate in a working group for focused discussions on a range of sub-topics. During these meetings the participants contributed their expertise, and began working on papers in their specialty areas. The ultimate product of this research project is an edited book on The Political Economy of the Persian Gulf (Columbia University Press/Hurst, 2011). The working group meetings held in Doha, Qatar, meant that authors were able to work closely together in order for the individual chapters to cross-reference each other for better coherence and intellectual synergy of the volume. Each study is an in-depth work of scholarship that is original, analytical, and makes a significant contribution to the field.

Global Change, Peace & Security, 2017

In the past half-decade, the role of the Gulf in the international political economy has changed dramatically. The region's position as a supplier of world hydrocarbons has slipped, even as local consumption of oil and gas continues to expand. Gulf investments have shifted from the industrialized countries to the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi Arabia no longer exercises disproportionate influence in the Group of 20. Finally, relations with the People's Republic of China and India have become truly interdependent, which gives the Gulf the capacity to exercise leverage over these two rising powers, despite its diminished position in global affairs.

This work seeks to test the viability of Rentier State Theory for explaining economic and political developments in the Arab Gulf. In particular, this theoretical paradigm is used to analyze the aforementioned developments in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC States): Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Oman. This research contends that the economic and political trajectories of the GCC states are directly linked to the accrual and dissemination of natural resource rents.

Occasional Paper 18, 2017

This essay takes as its focus society in the Persian Gulf over the long term, both before and after oil. In order to understand the transitions society has gone through, it is necessary to review the region’s historical evolution and how society in the Gulf today differs from that of the pre-oil era. The Gulf is presented as a distinct historical region, where a tradition of free movement helped account for the success of its port cities, themselves linked more to the Indian Ocean basin than the Middle East. In the twentieth century, the historic ties that connected the people of the Gulf littoral were curtailed as nationalism became the dominant ideology, and borders and passports were imposed. After oil was discovered and exports began following World War II, the small Gulf shaikhdoms, most of which were under British protection until 1971, experienced a surge in revenues that ushered in the modern era. Newly independent states sought to impose a new identity, manipulate history, and exploit sectarian cleavages to solidify the power of ruling dynasties. The historic cosmopolitanism of the Gulf was ignored by states that privileged the tribal, Bedouin heritage of their leaders. Arabs and Persians, both Sunni and Shi‘a, as well as many other groups have lived with each other in the region for many centuries, during which mutual differences occasionally led to conflict. But the current mistrust, tension, and sense of vulnerability felt by all sides is a product of the modern age.

International Affairs, 2007

Digest of Middle East Studies, 2000

his book attempts to identify and examine the impact of oil on socioeconomic and political changes a s well as development T in the (GCC) Gulf Cooperation Council countries with the aim of reflecting on the future challenges facing those countries.

Mediterranean Politics, 2015

Established in 2005, the Center for International and Regional Studies at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar is a premier research institute devoted to the academic study of regional and international issues through dialogue and exchange of ideas, research and scholarship, and engagement with national and international scholars, opinion makers, practitioners, and activists.

While the Indian Ocean has served as a model of historical and archaeological connectivity for decades, in-depth studies of regional development across the ocean often do not incorporate trans-regional evidence and are informed by divergent theoretical perspectives. For the Persian/Arabian Gulf, this has resulted in a profusion of studies on economic and political development that do not focus on concurrent cultural and social change, ignoring how large-scale economic trends influence life ‘on the ground’. Limited trans-regional engagement also constrains the economic and political narratives, which sometimes contradict evidence known from other parts of the Indian Ocean. This dissertation tackles the narrative of economic growth and subsequent decline in the 9th-14th century Gulf and re-examines it first through analysing settlement distribution in the western Indian Ocean, and then through a comparison of material culture from two sites in the Gulf – Kūsh and Bilad al-Qadīm. In doing so, it aims to problematise our understanding of the medieval history of the Gulf and the western Indian Ocean, as well as to nuance the widely-assumed link between economic and social or cultural change.

The Beirut Forum , 2021

The Persian Gulf is a relatively shallow body of water measuring 250,000 square kilometers, with elevated levels of salinity and high water temperatures. While these material features are uncontested, the Gulf's many political attributes are not. Whether it is the battle over its nomenclature-Persian or Arab Gulf-or the nineteenth century contention that it was a "British lake", or U.S. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger's quip in 1981 that it is "the umbilical cord of the industrial free world", for over a century policymakers and scholars have leveraged the Gulf to promote various local and global agendas. These projects range from justifying the British colonial presence in the Gulf until 1971, massive public and private investments by the United States since World War II, struggles for decolonization by various political movements, family strategies for upward mobility via migration, and regional rivalries between Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. What makes the Persian Gulf such a fraught space for so many decades and an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonism, and migratory hopes? By fraught I do not mean struggles over who is its rightful proprietor or disputes over a stable or true meaning of the Gulf. Instead, I contend that roots of these struggles are in the multiple and competing ways that the Gulf has been regionalized through concrete social formations and abstract representations. The larger book project which is the basis for this presentation shows how standard narratives of the region contain a common contradiction, treating the Gulf as a boundary between empires, states, Muslim sects, and alliance blocs, yet insisting that it is a regional whole and abstract object that can and should be secured or contained. It is in this manner that the Persian Gulf region has "come to take on a real existence in our consciousness", to use Adam Hanieh's phrase from the workshop's position paper; but the Gulf has also continuously been treated as vulnerable, with its borders constructed, eroded, and overlain by new forms of transnationalism-oceanic, imperial, international, and global.