This blog summarises some of the key ideas in a recently published article featured in the Conflict Research Programme’s Special Edition in the journal of Conflict, Security and Development: Identity Politics and Political Marketplaces. Focusing on the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar – in relation to the Arab Uprisings between 2011 and 2017 – the article points out their un-institutionalised nature and challenges the ‘geo-sectarian’ narrative often used to account for them. It argues that identity politics were indeed a central component of regime manoeuvring in this period, but that rulers were at least as concerned with suppressing or co-opting politically assertive forms of Sunni Islamism in the domestic sphere as they were with countering the supposedly geopolitical sectarian threat from Iran

Watkins, Jessica

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Jessica Watkins February 26th, 2021Identity Politics, Elites and Omnibalancing: Reassessing Arab GulfState Interventions in the Uprisings1 comment | 4 sharesEstimated reading time: 10 minutesThis blog summarises some of the key ideas in a recently published article featured in the Con ictResearch Programme’s Special Edition in the journal of Con ict, Security and Development: IdentityPolitics and Political Marketplaces. Focusing on the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, the UnitedArab Emirates and Qatar – in relation to the Arab Uprisings between 2011 and 2017 – the articlepoints out their un-institutionalised nature and challenges the ‘geo-sectarian’ narrative often used toaccount for them. It argues that identity politics were indeed a central component of regimemanoeuvring in this period, but that rulers were at least as concerned with suppressing or co-optingpolitically assertive forms of Sunni Islamism in the domestic sphere as they were with counteringthe supposedly geopolitical sectarian threat from Iran.The Arab Uprisings may have broadly failed to achieve the objectives of the Arab publics whoinitiated them, but they set in motion tectonic shifts in regional power con gurations. In 2018, MarcLynch commented that the region’s traditional ‘great powers’ – Egypt, Iraq and Syria (the principlecompetitors for regional hegemony since the 1950s) – had been reduced to barely functionalstates, whereas ‘wealthy and repressive Gulf countries – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United ArabEmirates – are thriving’.The survival of these rentier states and their increased assertiveness in regional politics points toan age in which wealth expenditure and redistribution has overtaken military capabilities andideological appeal as a determining feature of the regional order. Rather than proving the ‘greatpower’ status of the Arab Gulf regimes, however, their interventions in the Uprisings show theirvolatility and resistance to institutionalised statehood in both domestic and regional contexts.Moreover, their  uctuating sponsorship of militant Islamist factions in different con icts signalstheir similarities with political marketplaces which are intertwined with exclusivist identity politics inother parts of the world.Regional interventions by the Gulf states and Iran into con icts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen andBahrain over the past decade, particularly in the period between 2011 and 2017, have beenfrequently viewed in terms of ‘geo-sectarianism’; whether in form of direct military incursions, or,more commonly, in form of economic and discursive interventions.The rationale for the geo-sectarian explanation is easy to see: since 2010, inter-sectarian violencehas been a prominent feature of intra-state con icts across the Middle East. Although the theorythat primordial, ‘ancient hatreds’ between Sunni and Shia dating back to the seventh century havemotivated this violence retains some popular credence, the more common account in academiccircles attributes the rise of sectarianism to the predominance of authoritarian regimes in theregion, whereby rival states cynically instrumentalise sect as a means of leveraging support fromsubsections of different populations.For a  eeting few years, patterns of support from regional states to domestic actors appeared tobroadly correspond to sectarian a liations. The fact that the leading actors (the Shi’a theocracyruling Iran and the Wahhabi House of Saud) claim the moral leadership of Shi’a and Sunni Islamrespectively within the region reinforced a ‘geo-sectarian’ reading of events. Iran came to theassistance of the (loosely categorised) Shi’a regimes in Syria and Iraq, as well as an array of non-state militant Shi’a regional allies. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia attempted to galvanise Sunni regimes –including the GCC members, Jordan, Morocco and even, brie y, Turkey – into diplomatic andmilitary alliances to prop up failing Sunni regimes and/or confront Iranian encroachment. Within afew years, the diverging priorities of the notional Sunni ‘front’ crystalised. While Saudi remainspitted against Iran in several theatres, Qatar has molli ed its position towards Tehran. An era ofmulti-polarity prevails amidst the uncertainty created by inconclusive domestic con icts. Yet, areview of the domestic issues that promoted Arab Gulf state interventions in the 2011–2017 periodsuggests they were always driven more by parochial concerns than by power politics, and thisre ects on their underlying logics of rule.iRivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran are well-documented; they have waxed and waned sincethe 1979 Iranian revolution, and are frequently articulated in form of sectarian differences. In 2003,the overthrow of the Baath regime opened the door to increased Iranian in uence in Iraq, whereShi’a political parties and militias received guidance, funding and expertise from Tehran, and this inturn gave King Abdullah of Jordan grounds to warn of the emergence of a Shi’a ‘crescent’ of Iranianin uence stretching from Beirut through Damascus and Baghdad to Tehran.Yet, the geo-sectarian account is  awed on three central counts explored in my article. First, theSunni and Shi’a labels are misleadingly black and white. While the Assad Syrian regime is countedas part of the Shi’a camp, and General Sisi’s Egyptian regime falls to the Sunni side, both  t betterinto secular than Islamist categories. And while the Syrian regime is predominantly Alawite, untilrecently, the orthodox Twelver Shi’a of Iran tended to categorise Alawites as deviants, if not in dels.Their recognition as Shi’a within the past decade is based on Assad’s pragmatic alliance with Iranas opposed to any theological epiphany. In Yemen, the Zaydi Houthis were similarly categorised asdeviants, hailing from a sect that split from Twelver Shi’ism in the eighth century AD. Their‘reidenti cation’ as Shi’a is also recent and largely a product of Sunni sala  propaganda.More generally, Iranian assistance to regional Shi’a militant groups is as much a tactic of necessityas of design. Shi’a comprise less than  fteen percent of the total population in the Middle East, andwhile there may be truth to claims that Iran is attempting to ‘Shi’ify’ Sunni populations in areasunder its in uence, overall it is not in Iran’s interests to put all of its eggs into one sectarian basket.Rather, Iran has sought to promote its image among Arab populations as the leader of the Axis ofResistance against Western imperialism; the champion of Palestine, as evidenced in its support forSunni Palestinian groups including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and the true embodiment of‘Islamism’, not only for Shi’a but for Sunnis.In this vein, the entire geo-sectarian debate might be passed off as a rhetorical tool employed bythe Sunni Arab Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, as a means of de ecting Iran’s criticism ofSaudi shortcomings in upholding Islam. In reality, and this is exposing the second majorshortcoming of the geo-sectarian thesis, even at the height of sectarian warfare the actions ofseveral Sunni Arab Gulf regimes in the regional sphere were at least as much motivated by theirrulers’ calculations over the relative threat posed to their own survival by the Muslim Brotherhoodand other politically assertive forms of Sunni Islamism in the domestic sphere, as they were by theperceived need to counter Iran.The idea that the Arab Gulf regimes’ foreign policies are determined by their calculations of thenature of threats emanating from both internal and external sources is not new: Gerd Nonneman,following Steven David, refers to this practice as omnibalancing. In this article, however, with closereference to the policies of the Saudi, Emirati and Qatari elites, I modify the idea of omnibalancingto argue that, as well as reacting to threats in the domestic and international spheres, regimes alsoseek out opportunities to extend their economic and/or ‘moral’ in uence at home and abroad. I alsohighlight the fact that the alliances formed by regimes in the international sphere are notnecessarily restricted to other regimes, but include a range of non-state movements and actors.The article’s  nal challenge to the geo-sectarian thesis is that it often goes hand in hand with thenarrative of a New Arab Cold War, in which Saudi and its allies range themselves against Iran andits allies, using proxies to  ght for in uence in the region’s ‘weak’ states. Whilst the Saudi-Iranianrivalry is not disputed, the Cold War imagery creates a misleading impression of how regimesproject power and in uence within the region. Unlike the US vs Soviet Cold War of the 1940s-1980s,there was never really any overarching bipolar division of Middle Eastern ‘Great Powers’ in the post2010 period – whatever Saudi rhetoric might have suggested. The personalised nature of rule in theArab Gulf states means that even ‘powerful’ state actors in the region display latent volatility andcan rapidly change course.The Saudi, Qatari and UAE regimes do not so much lack institutional frameworks through which toimplement foreign policy. Rather, they purposely resist them, pursuing international interests on atransactional basis whilst mixing political, security and commercial interests, and treating publico ce and personal interest as coterminous. The political marketplace, which posits that behaviourin the regional/international sphere is an extension of domestic politics on the basis of monetisedloyalty transactions, offers a potentially compelling route for how to explore this volatility.[i] A political marketplace is, according to Alex de Waal, ‘a contemporary system of governance,characterized by pervasive monetized patronage, in the form of exchange of political loyalty orcooperation for payment.’Note: The CRP blogs gives the views of the author, not the position of the Con ict ResearchProgramme, the London School of Economics and Political Science, or the UK Government.About the authorPosted In: Featured | Identity Politics | Middle East North Africa1 CommentsRead NextBeyond Sectarianism? Transnational Identity Politics &amp; Con ict in the Modern MiddleEast: Pasts, Presents, FuturesNovember 7th 2018Jessica is a Research O cer at the LSE Middle East Centre working on the Con ict ResearchProgramme - MENA and Iraq.Jessica Watkins

Identity politics, elites and omnibalancing: reassessing Arab Gulf state interventions in the uprisings

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/109072/1/crp_2021_02_26_identity_politics_elites_omnibalancing.pdf

Identity politics, elites and omnibalancing: reassessing Arab Gulf state interventions in the uprisings

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