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"Tribes Bahrain"
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Tribal modern
In the 1970s, one of the most torrid and forbidding regions in the world burst on to the international stage. The discovery and subsequent exploitation of oil allowed tribal rulers of the U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait to dream big. How could fishermen, pearl divers and pastoral nomads catch up with the rest of the modernized world? Even today, society is skeptical about the clash between the modern and the archaic in the Gulf. But could tribal and modern be intertwined rather than mutually exclusive? Exploring everything from fantasy architecture to neo-tribal sports and from Emirati dress codes to neo-Bedouin poetry contests, Tribal Modern explodes the idea that the tribal is primitive and argues instead that it is an elite, exclusive, racist, and modern instrument for branding new nations and shaping Gulf citizenship and identity—an image used for projecting prestige at home and power abroad.
eBook
Political Transformation of Gulf Tribal States
The reform movements and attempts to establish parliamentary institutions in the Persian Gulf states of Kuwait, Bahrain and Dubai between the First World War and the independent era of the 1970s were not inspired by western example or by any tradition of civil representation. The move to a parliamentary system not only represented a milestone in the history of the region, creating a legacy for future generations, but was a unique transition in the Arab world. The transformation of these states from loose chiefdoms of minimal coherence and centralization, into centralizing and institutionalized monarchies, involved the setting up of primary institutions of government, the demarcation of borders, and establishment of a monarchical order. As this new political and social order evolved, ideas of national struggle and national rights penetrated Gulf societies. Gulf citizens who had spent time in Arab states, mostly in Egypt and Iraq, took part in the genesis of a public Arab-Gulf national discourse, enabling the Gulf population to become acquainted with national struggles for independence. As a result merchants of notable families, newly educated elements, and even workers, began to oppose the dominance of the rulers. Both the rulers and the commercial elites (including members of the ruling families) tried to formulate a new and different social contract with the rulers seeking to entrench their political power by using new administrative means and financial power. Opposition against this current crystallized in 1938 among the ranks of the commercial oligarchy as well as within the ruling families. In spite of its failure to create its own political institutions, the oligarchy remained the foremost social and economic class. But the ruling families could no longer treat national oil revenues as their private income, and they began to channel part of these funds to public needs. The most important consequence of the '1938' movement was the formation of a new social contract between the two traditional power centers: the governing structures were fitted into the political and economic reality brought about by the oil wealth, but remained essentially tribal and committed to the power division between the major Gulf families.
eBook
Frontier fictions
InFrontier Fictions, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The \"frontier fictions,\" or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity.
Kashani-Sabet maintains that land-based conceptions of countries existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. While many historians have focused on the concept of the \"imagined community\" in their explanations of the rise of nationalism, Kashani-Sabet is able to complement this perspective with a very tangible explanation of what connects people to a specific place. Her approach is intended to enrich our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.
eBook
Iraqi Tribal Support for Coalition Efforts in Iraq Heavily Excised
Offers talking points for discussing with Middle Eastern countries establishment of Iraqi government representing all tribal groups.
Government Document
Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing Society
The deficient political development of Bahrain's modernized tribal system is demonstrated through the absence of political parties (hence the political importance of social clubs), the restrictions on the press, the politicization of labor (due to its suppression), and the constraints imposed by the conservative regional political climate. A roughly contemporaneous anthropological study by Fuad Khuri contributes a masterful analysis of the differing socioeconomic bases of Bahrain's Sunni tribal, merchant, and Shi'a peasant communities which set their divergent orientations toward the bureaucratization of tribal rule and the developmental state.1 And a more recent book by Laurence Louer provides an astute picture of the Islamic forces which swept the Gulf after the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as of the retreat back to national politics engineered by today's Shi'a Islamist oppositions.2 In his epilogue Nakhleh notes that the parliament formed in fulfillment of the new constitution provided a potent public forum for criticizing the policies of the government.
Book Review
The Arab Gulf States: Balancing Regional Security and Domestic Political Changes
This essay discusses two recent books about the Arab Gulf states that focus on regional security and domestic political change, respectively. The books are evaluated in light of the 2011 Arab uprisings, with an eye toward raising several new questions for future research: Regarding the Gulf's regional security, have the 2011 uprisings changed attitudes among the Arab Gulf states' ruling elites concerning the possibility of moving away from separate U.S. security guarantees toward a more self-reliant collective security mechanism? Regarding domestic political change, how have the 2011 uprisings reshaped popular and elite attitudes about popular participation? These two volumes are valuable resources for any future research related to these issues.
Book Review