Suchergebnisse

Insecure Gulf examines how the concept of Arabian/Persian Gulf 'security' is evolving in response to new challenges that are increasingly non-military and longer-term. Food, water and energy security, managing and mitigating the impact of environmental degradation and climate change, addressing demographic pressures and the youth bulge and reformulating structural economic deficiencies, in addition to dealing with the fallout from progressive state failure in Yemen, require a broad, global and multi-dimensional approach to Gulf security. While 'traditional' threats from Iraq, Iran, nuclear pro

Reinventing the Sheikhdom: Clan, Power and Patronage in Mohammed bin Zayed's UAE, by Matthew Hedges. London: Hurst & Co., 2021. 324 pages. £25.

This essay examines how and why Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have pursued policies that have aligned closer to Israel since 2011. The disruptive impact of the Arab Spring and its turbulent aftermath altered threat perceptions in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which increasingly saw Islamism and Iran as the major sources of regional instability. For Saudi and Emirati leaders committed to adopting a more forceful approach to shaping the post-Arab Spring landscape, Israel no longer represented the primary fissure in Middle Eastern politics. Although the process of creating informal ties between the Gulf states and Israel has been decades in the making, the nature of the post-2011 connections between Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Israel have greater strategic depth and are taking place in a far more open setting than ever before.

Amid the fire and fury of Michael Wolff's explosive account of the Trump presidency so far, readers hoping for greater insight into some of the international controversies of his first year in office were left wanting more than the few pages on the president's May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel. Wolff suggests that the 'Trump Doctrine' boiled down to a transactional 'If you give us what we want, we'll give you what you want', and that Saudi Arabia had become a test case to put it into action. Yet beyond a few platitudes about the ties between Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Wolff did not dwell on the runup to and the aftermath of the Riyadh Summit that Trump attended in May 2017. This is an omission because the outreach by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the then-incoming administration provides a cautionary tale about the conduct of foreign policy in the Age of Trump.

Amid the fire and fury of Michael Wolff's explosive account of the Trump presidency so far, readers hoping for greater insight into some of the international controversies of his first year in office were left wanting more than the few pages on the president's May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel. Wolff suggests that the 'Trump Doctrine' boiled down to a transactional 'If you give us what we want, we'll give you what you want', and that Saudi Arabia had become a test case to put it into action. Yet beyond a few platitudes about the ties between Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Wolff did not dwell on the runup to and the aftermath of the Riyadh Summit that Trump attended in May 2017. This is an omission because the outreach by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the then-incoming administration provides a cautionary tale about the conduct of foreign policy in the Age of Trump.

Years of anger at Doha's brash regional policies may have made the opportunity to put Qatar back in its place too tempting to pass up.

The rentier states of the Middle East face a combination of political and economic challenges as they seek to reduce their reliance on volatile oil and gas revenues and diversify their economies. This article examines how the political economy of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states remains heavily dependent on the hydrocarbon sector and analyses the policy responses to the fall in world oil prices since 2014. Sections in the article examine the definitional aspect of rentier state theory, nature of the redistributive welfare state that developed in the 1970s in each Gulf State, and the political aspect of economic measures that seek to reform aspects of the distinctive political economy that has underpinned socio-political and economic stability for the past five decades.