Suchergebnisse

In her pivotal work on Kuwaiti politics, Mary Ann Tétreault provides an
"insider's guide" to the private and public spaces in which struggles over
communal power are pursued by the government, the Parliament, and the people of Kuwait.
Tétreault is careful to call her text "Stories of Democracy," as she realizes
the reflexive nature of what democracy means at different periods in history (before oil, after oil,
under Iraqi occupation, in post-Liberation Kuwait); for different people in Kuwait (women, the
merchants, government officials, tribal leaders, service politicians, opposition leaders); and in
different contexts (the mosque, the diwaniyya or men's social club, the civic
association, Parliament, the government). With this in mind, she argues that
"democracy" is a "concept that 'moves' depending on
one's assumptions" (p. 3). Her basic message is that Kuwaiti politics resembles the
politics of the Greek city-state, and she relies on various forms of Aristotelian comparison to
explore this concept. Moreover, Tétreault illustrates that much of Kuwaiti politics
resembles a high-stakes soap opera. For example, she calls the bad debt crisis "one of the
longest running soap operas in Kuwaiti politics" (p. 164). In Chapter 4, she labels Kuwaiti
politics "a family romance, whose grip on political actors constrains their choices"
(p. 67). Toward the end of her text in chapter 8, Tétreault combines these metaphors
when she observes that in the city-state that is Kuwait, politics are "the product of a
domestic public life that seems all too often like life in a large and contentious family" (p.
206).